The Taxidermist's Daughter

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The accomplished director has plenty on, with a revival of Portia Coughlan at London’s Almeida Theatre, an opera in New York and several films in development. 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. Pearl Chanda as Cassie, a woman defined by mystery, avoids the floaty tone that such roles risk, finding psychological specificity. The dangers of the marshland – the wind has “teeth”, and the water “pulses” – cleverly echo and magnify the suspenseful and precarious nature of its inhabitants’ lives. With the book set in the nearby Fishbourne Marshes, and with Mosse a born and bred local, this play feels rooted in the landscape.

So when a new artistic director – Daniel Evans – arrived six years ago, with a mission that included getting the local community more involved, nothing was more natural than to invite him over for supper. And after a dead woman is found floating near their home, Connie is caught up in a web of mystery, blackmail and murder. The play has a large supporting cast, but its strongest support comes from Posy Sterling (as servant Mary) and Akai Osei (as errand boy Davey), who both work well together with Proper’s Connie, and add light to the proceedings. 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. In The Taxidermist’s Daughter, Connie has taken over the stuffing of animals her father is too drunk to see.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. 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.

Róisín McBrinn’s production – featuring violent moments going eyeball-to-eyeball with King Lear – is visually engulfing. Yet, if it’s not clear how we’re going to get there, it’s always pretty obvious where we’re heading – so the denouement, when it arrives, is surprising only for the melodramatic histrionics into which McBrinn’s direction abruptly descends. Fishbourne, where Connie lives, is hauntingly described by Mosse, who tells us this is a love letter to her home village. She is a victim of traumatic memory loss and the plot involves her mind’s retrieval of obscene happenings 10 years previously. Her favourite plays include Hangmen by Martin McDonagh, and A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood.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.

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. 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. Meanwhile, her tormented father drinks to escape the past and it’s up to Connie to secretly keep their dilapidated taxidermy museum, unseemly for a lady, going. Connie, unusually for a young lady, has learned her father’s craft and practices it with relish and precision. 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.We were chatting away when he suddenly put his hand in his bag, slapped The Taxidermist’s Daughter on the table and said, ‘I want you to do this for me,’” says Mosse, who was so busy with her other lives – as a novelist, carer, and literary activist – that it took several years to get back to him. 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 novel in question is The Taxidermist’s Daughter, which is set around Mosse’s home near Chichester in the unusually stormy year of 1912. We have published a new cookies policy, which you should read to find out more about the cookies we use. The closer we come to understanding the events and characters of the present, the more of her dark past is revealed, and vice versa.

Paul Wills’s set is a lovely puzzle of rising and sliding parts, fluidly introducing medical and museum vitrines, homes, offices and coastland. I think it’s very easy, particularly as a woman, to not be prepared to fail, but women have to be ambitious. As Connie bemoans, “only men with their delicate little hands” are allowed to become taxidermists, not women. Mosse weaves some difficult themes into the narrative, such as the effects of sexual violence, murder and grief, and her descriptions of the marshlands of Fishbourne – where she herself grew up – are outstanding. With her father barely able to work, she has learnt the trade, meticulously slicing and eviscerating black birds, admiring the ruby glow of their innards against the glossy jet of their feathers.Paul Wills fills a stage fringed with reeds and rushes with gauze boxes that, artfully lit by Prema Mehta, transform into vitrines housing a human skeleton and displays of stuffed birds. A famous former museum inspired her, too: the Museum of Curiosities, a taxidermist’s popular collection that Mosse visited as a child, is reimagined here as the long-closed Gifford’s Museum of Avian Taxidermy. We did pre-marriage counselling, which was successful, and a chemistry test – which is essential, because if you can’t find a flow, a sense that you can collaborate, then personally I’m not interested. At the core of it,” says director Róisín McBrinn, “is a young woman who has been separated from the justice that she deserves – which, unfortunately, is still a very common theme. Sinéad Diskin’s sound has a vaguely Wicker Man-ish folksy menace, and Andrzej Goulding’s video impressively conjures dark, rain-lashed nights and a climactic flood.