The Taxidermist’s Daughter is set in the momentous year of 1912, yet this fact seems far from important. A lovely puzzle of rising and sliding parts’ … The Taxidermist’s Daughter 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’s all boiled down to the story of two women’s fight to redress wrongs they have suffered at the hands of powerful and secretive men. Raad Rawi’s distinguished but disconcerting Dr Woolston could have walked out of a Wilkie Collins story – as, in a sense, he has.

She must do her work in secret – firstly, because she’s not a man, but secondly, because her father ( Forbes Masson) is unable to do the work himself, torn apart by past guilt and self-soothing with drink. Years ago, when we first began to visit Cornwall our kids were fascinated by the Victorian museum of stuffed animals, then housed at Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor. And after a dead woman is found floating near their home, Connie is caught up in a web of mystery, blackmail and murder. 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.Sea water surges through the marshes and carrion birds gather ominously above the local church as long-submerged evils bubble to the surface, confronting the eponymous heroine Connie Gifford with memories she lost years earlier in a mysterious childhood accident. 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. She is a victim of traumatic memory loss and the plot involves her mind’s retrieval of obscene happenings 10 years previously.

Ten years earlier, she fell down the stairs of her father’s then-thriving museum and lost her memory.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.

And a woman who is believed less than the men around her, were she to have had the opportunity even to be heard. Robbed of her childhood memories by a mysterious accident, Connie is haunted by fitful glimpses of her past. 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. Mosse’s main trade is impressive novels which may make her dialogue sometimes baldly explanatory – “I had an accident when I was a child. So often video projections seem simply unwitting reminders of all the things that live theatre cannot do (and so seem poor substitutes); yet here they are a key part of the play’s subtle build towards its devastating conclusion.We have published a new cookies policy, which you should read to find out more about the cookies we use. 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. This decision meant stripping out a lot of the novelistic detail, such as the gory processes of Victorian taxidermy. I loved her other books set in France but this just chilled me to the core and when I saw a crow on the lawn the next day, a shiver went up my spine. 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.