Gripping, moving and intricately written, The Taxidermist’s Daughter will surely delight [Mosse’s] legions of fans. It’s perfectly paced and impossible to put down” This play is not for the squeamish because detailed descriptions of the process of taxidermy abound. Taxidermy, specifically of the avian and – queasily – human varieties, is the nifty storytelling device on which Mosse swathes the skin of her story and keeps the plot zipping along. As Connie bemoans, “only men with their delicate little hands” are allowed to become taxidermists, not women. 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. 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.

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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. It took some help from Mosse’s actor son, Felix, to excavate the play from the novel. “As a novelist, I’m used to being responsible for the whole world. He would often say, ‘The actor will play that, Mum.’ On the stage, you have flesh and blood, so don’t tell the actor how to act.” The big structural decision was to turn the story from a gothic mystery – which only unravels towards the end, as Connie’s memories return – to a revenge drama involving, from the outset, a second woman, Cassie, who is a shadow presence for most of the novel. The one thing that elevates the play is Paul Wills’s design, a feast for the eyes making intelligent use of every inch of the capacious stage, and working in brilliant tandem with Prema Mehta’s lighting and Sinéad Diskin’s sound. Together, they impressively evoke the rain-lashed marshlands, storm waves crashing into sea walls, the town square, the church, various other interiors, Connie’s fragments of memory and the Giffords’ cabinets of curiosities. And all with an economy of transition from scene to scene.

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. Her recollections are as gauzy as the boxes cleverly doubling as museum exhibits, tables or artworks, dotted around the stage by designer Paul Willis. 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.Of course, there’s blood to be spilt. Kate Mosse’s gothic yarn owes plenty to both Collins and Hill: there are spooky goings on, treacherous tidal waters and asylum incarcerations.

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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.

Kate Mosse has developed her own attachment to these Victorian curiosities into a spectacularly spooky gothic tale in her novel. 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. They gather outside the old church one the Eve of St Mark, when they believe that the ghosts of those destined to die in the coming year will materialise as the church bell tolls.The production neatly treads the line between suggestive and visible gore. 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. 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.With such a carefully considered script delivering poignant lines with scalpel-like precision (“Men like them – they make the rules, then break the rules” was particularly apt for 1912 but also 2022), I didn’t want to miss a thing. Mosse is an engaging storyteller, deftly dealing with the intricacies of her involving, gruesome plot”