The Taxidermist's Daughter

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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. 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.

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.Photograph: Ellie Kurttz ‘A lovely puzzle of rising and sliding parts’ … The Taxidermist’s Daughter at Chichester festival theatre. 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. The secrets Mosse reveals are truly shocking; local men bound by a sinister agreement; threats; ghostly notes and gruesome discoveries. Raad Rawi’s distinguished but disconcerting Dr Woolston could have walked out of a Wilkie Collins story – as, in a sense, he has.

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.And the kind of cohesive power of a community to suppress secrets, unfortunately, is not something that’s gone away.

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. 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.

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. 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.