The Taxidermist's Daughter

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Photograph: Ellie Kurttz ‘I’m hungry for new experiences’ … Mosse’s adaptation at Chichester Festival theatre. If only the same could be said of the next two hours of this muddling mix of flat exposition, murky Edwardiana, earnest moralising and Grand Guignol. The Taxidermist’s Daughter is set in the momentous year of 1912, yet this fact seems far from important. It starts with a spurt of high theatricality: smoke and spotlights and singing and wildlife, all amid a deluge of rain in a Sussex churchyard. A dark but thrilling play about country superstition, power dynamics and artistry, adapted by Kate Mosse from her Gothic novel, and rightly debuting in the Sussex county where the action takes place.

But although this wonderful novel ends on a note of hope, the reader is all too aware that only a couple of years in the future, the world will be plunged into darkness. She is a victim of traumatic memory loss and the plot involves her mind’s retrieval of obscene happenings 10 years previously. Weather is a pathetic fallacy, drivingour characters towards stormy clashes, and giving a real sense of immersion, as though the fiercely falling rain could splash the first few rows of seats. This decision meant stripping out a lot of the novelistic detail, such as the gory processes of Victorian taxidermy. Because doing a new play is a huge thing for any director, and I’m quite an odd first playwright, even given that I’ve done some other stuff before.Daniel Evans, boss at Chichester, has commissioned Kate Mosse to adapt her blood-soaked mystery, set around the local West Sussex marshlands during the record wet spring of 1912. Kate Mosse has developed her own attachment to these Victorian curiosities into a spectacularly spooky gothic tale in her novel. A cluster of taxidermy birds, billowing dresses and stormy weather could be the recipe for a Goth’s ideal summer, but in fact these are all ingredients for a new stage adaptation of brooding historical thriller The Taxidermist’s Daughter, brought to Chichester Festival Theatre by the author herself, Kate Mosse.

She has just delivered a book celebrating the role of women in history – due for publication in October – but her next project will be an original play. Set ‘on the edge of the drowned marshes’ of a small Sussex village in 1912, the book opens with a bizarre midnight ceremony held by villagers every year. I enjoyed this book but even after reading it twice I still don’t know when how or why Cassie could have had reparation, what could they have said, and when. More subtext is generally what the piece needs: the story is always plotty and enjoyable but metaphors suggested by the dominant morbid imagery might have been pushed further in the script. As Connie bemoans, “only men with their delicate little hands” are allowed to become taxidermists, not women.Mosse’s main trade is impressive novels which may make her dialogue sometimes baldly explanatory – “I had an accident when I was a child. I would have liked to see similar sensitivity with Sinéad Diskin’s sound design, which was often too loud and driven by heavy bass tones, meaning some characters’ lines were missed. com shall not be deemed to endorse, recommend, approve and/or guarantee such events, or any facts, views, advice and/or information contained therein. In archetypal gothic fashion, it’s a harbinger of what is to come, but the play’s most pressing conundrum is the amnesia that Connie Gifford (Daisy Prosper) has suffered since she fell down a flight of stairs when she was 12. Her artistry blends nicely with frustrated amateur painter Harry ( Taheen Modak), also trying to bring life to his work but, unlike Connie and her father, not worried about paying the bills.

The acting is otherwise pedestrian, with the liveliest performances coming from Akai Osei as a sharp-witted mudlark, and Pearl Chanda as a wild avenger in a veiled black hat, swooping on the hypocritical local burghers like a raven, gimlet-eyed, clawing and cawing. The story might be set in 1912, but Cassie’s – and indeed Mosse’s – denunciation of the ghastly sense of entitlement which leads some people to mock the laws that the rest of us observe hits home powerfully right now in 2022.An interconnected dual mystery is at the core of the novel, whose heroine, Constantia Gifford, practises her father’s trade, for with the failure of his once-thriving business, Gifford’s World Famous House of Avian Curiosities, the taxidermist has sunk into drunken inertia. Gripping, moving and intricately written, The Taxidermist’s Daughter will surely delight [Mosse’s] legions of fans. The ghoulishness of stuffed, menacing birds, was offset by the charming set-pieces of hamsters and guinea pigs, sitting at desks in a tiny schoolroom, or all dressed up for a wedding. The production opens Chichester Festival Theatre’s 60th anniversary season and is a potent mix inspired by Mosse’s love of the saltwater estuary and marshlands of Fishbourne, the village in which the play is set in 1912, and the surrounding areas of the historic city of Chichester itself. Kate Mosse omits mention of the year’s defining events – the sinking of the Titanic, the suffragette movement, industrialisation – and focuses, instead, on the events of a small, insular, marshland town, Fishbourne, in Sussex, and its occupants.

Her earliest memory of theatre was a Postman Pat stage show; she's since progressed to enjoying drama, comedy and musicals without children's TV themes. Though some viewers might find later scenes a bit much, I felt it was tastefully done; to be fair, you can’t expect a play about taxidermy and trauma to be completely sanitised. Although the book is set in 1912, only two years before the outbreak of the Great War, the atmosphere in remote Fishbourne seems almost Victorian, perfect for Mosse’s theme of taxidermy (which involves plenty of gory disembowelling) and dark, homicidal secrets. Whilst Connie guts dead birds and reassembles them in lifelike scenes, she struggles to reassemble her memories of the past, disturbed by a childhood accident 10 yearsearlier. Willis’ deliberately sparse design helps illustrate this, with clumps of reeds at the edge of the stage, and a series of screens showing projections of reeds, rain, and storms, echoed by projections on the stage floor itself to amplify the effects.Several mysteries are packed into Mosse’s plot, which starts portentously on a clap of thunder, a strange woman intoning the folk song Who Killed Cock Robin and a letting loose of jackdaws, magpies, rooks and crows on men invited to a church in a scene reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The novel opens with a murder in a graveyard at midnight; crows and magpies crowd its landscape; and Mosse’s prose, which begins with a dramatic one-word sentence, “Midnight”, and is interrupted, throughout, by a repeated phrase “Blood. This year’s 60th anniversary at the CFT demanded a striking work to kick off the celebrations – and it gets precisely that with Chichester author Kate Mosse’s stage adaptation of her own 2014 novel The Taxidermist’s Daughter. Meanwhile, the fractured events of the past are being brought to light by a mysterious veiled woman, targeting local residents with their own secrets to hide.