The Taxidermist's Daughter

Product Information

So, all the ingredients are there to make this play scintillating and transportive, but there’s a sense that it wants to have its cake and eat it by yoking together a gothic mystery and revenge thriller. Still, a pleasant night at the theatre. I’ve very much enjoyed turning 60,” says Kate Mosse, tipping several sachets of sugar into a cup of takeaway coffee. It’s 9am, and the bestselling novelist and founder of the Women’s prize for fiction has travelled up to London from her home on the Sussex coast to sit in on a rehearsal of her first full-length play, staged at Chichester Festival theatre.

This is an excellent gothic romp of a novel, and Mosse sets it in her native Sussex, where the marshes are both haunting and threatening, and the sea is prone to dramatic flooding. 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. And if this atmospheric opening of Kate Mosse’s adaptation of her gothic suspense novel from 2014 teeters on the edge of absurdity, it holds its balance and doesn’t topple over. Rosin McBrinn’s direction keeps the action taut, but there’s no getting away from the fact that there’s a tad too much exposition and not enough dramatic meat linking the disparate elements of the plot for the uniformly excellent actors to chew on. Which is why when Connie fully regains her memory, during a macabre vignette featuring four men in penguin suits and bird masks enacting an arcane ritual, it feels like overwrought padding. 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.What happens instead is a murder. A few days later the body of a young woman is found floating in a stream beside the house of our heroine, 22 year old Connie Gifford. The woman has been garrotted with a taxidermist’s wire. Connie suspects her alcoholic father of the crime; he is indeed the local taxidermist, once wealthy owner of a fabled museum, now a failed drunk since te vogue for stuffed birds fell out of fashion. 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 don’t always remember” – in the way of a narrator’s usually candid relationship with the reader, rather than more ambiguous theatre speech, leaving actors space to grace-notes with voice and face. 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.

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. Connie is bright, beautiful and determined. She is a victim of traumatic memory loss and the plot involves her mind’s retrieval of obscene happenings 10 years previously. The closer we come to understanding the events and characters of the present, the more of her dark past is revealed, and vice versa. Clues carefully placed throughout neatly come together in a climax that has all the ingredients of a typical gothic thriller – a storm and a flood, a fallen woman and the reveal of a gruesome crime. In the stage adaptation of her own bestselling novel The Taxidermist’s Daughter, Kate Mosse (co-founder of the Women’s prize for fiction) collides amnesia, sexual predation, corvid symbolism and female-exacted retribution. 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. 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. She has fleeting flashes of what happened, involving a mysterious woman called Cassie, but has never been able to fully reconstruct what led up to her fall.

It’s the same year that the suffragettes started using militant tactics but curiously, given the play’s message of female empowerment, that newsworthiness doesn’t seem to have penetrated the sleepy facade of this village, a hotbed of sordid secrets in this story. 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. 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. 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.