Taxidermist’s Daughter offers thrilling start to Chichester Festival Theatre's 60th anniversary

Posy Sterling as Mary Christie & Daisy Prosper as Connie Gifford in The Taxidermist’s Daughter photo by Ellie Kurttz

The Taxidermist’s Daughter, Chichester Festival Theatre, until April 30

It’s difficult to remember a more gripping start to a Chichester Festival Theatre summer.

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.

It’s also a reminder of the fact that we so rarely get a genuine thriller on any stage – and just how wonderful it is when we do. But what completes the circle so beautifully is that this is a play set in and around Chichester and Fishbourne – the perfect way to mark the 60th anniversary of a theatre which was so famously created by the Chichester community out of which it grew.

It was difficult to imagine how Mosse’s richly atmospheric book – with its very specific marshland setting – was going to transfer for the stage. The answer is remarkably well thanks to the art of suggestion. 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.

Read interview with Kate Mosse here

The gist is that Connie Gifford – beautifully played by Daisy Prosper on her professional debut – is the daughter of a broken, drunken taxidermist; she is also the witness to a trauma, years before, so profound that her mind has wrapped it up in amnesia as its way of coping.

The cruelty is that she knows she has seen something – and that something is starting to come back to her in fragments which she desperately tries to piece together.

Connie’s story is intertwined with that of the victim of the crime she doesn’t initially know she saw, Cassie, a woman who has now escaped from Graylingwell and is intent on revenge, knowing that conventional justice is impossible in a world where the men who make the rules are the men who break the rules and also the men who then pass judgement.

The story might be set in 1912, but Cassie’s – and indeed Mosse’s – denunciation of the ghastly sense of entitlement which leads some people to mock the laws that the rest of us observe hits home powerfully right now in 2022.

You almost want the audience to cheer as Cassie says the line.

Throughout the piece, Mosse shows a remarkable, razor-sharp understanding of the damaged mind – a mind which in one case wraps itself in a protective carapace which starts to crumble and in the other demands the most brutal retribution.

Pearl Chanda gives Cassie an unnverving calmness in her carnage as thriller turns to horror – something very very rarely seen on the CFT stage.

Under Róisín McBrinn’s expert direction, this is a piece which doesn’t pull any punches. It is graphic – and rightly comes with a warning. But the brilliance is that it is horror so completely rooted in character and circumstance.

Read interview with the director here

It’s all the best possible start to this landmark season.

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