The Taxidermist's Daughter

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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.

However, this dramatisation, adapted from her own 2014 novel by Mosse herself, is such an exasperating muddle that by the time it limps to its conclusion we’ve long since lost all interest in unlocking its mysteries. Róisín McBrinn’s production is clodhopping, unevenly acted, and occasionally unintentionally hilarious – and its pace is deadly. 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.I think it’s very easy, particularly as a woman, to not be prepared to fail, but women have to be ambitious. 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. 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. com shall not be deemed to endorse, recommend, approve and/or guarantee such events, or any facts, views, advice and/or information contained therein.

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.I’ve very much enjoyed turning 60,” says Kate Mosse, tipping several sachets of sugar into a cup of takeaway coffee.

The secrets Mosse reveals are truly shocking; local men bound by a sinister agreement; threats; ghostly notes and gruesome discoveries. As a major storm hits the Sussex landscape, old wounds are about to be opened as one woman, intent on revenge, attempts to liberate another from the horrifying crimes of the past. If only the same could be said of the next two hours of this muddling mix of flat exposition, murky Edwardiana, earnest moralising and Grand Guignol. Gripping, moving and intricately written, The Taxidermist’s Daughter will surely delight [Mosse’s] legions of fans. 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 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. Across the table from her, in an unglamorous basement room that smells faintly of mildew, is the director who is helping her to transform one of her novels into a piece of theatre. Róisín McBrinn’s twilit production has some artful flourishes, but the play lacks clarity and forward momentum. 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.