Chichester director promising Gothic tale of retribution and justice

It runs at Chichester Festival Theatre from April 8-30 – and director Róisín McBrinn believes the timing couldn’t possibly be better.

1912. In the isolated Blackthorn House on Sussex’s Fishbourne Marshes, Connie Gifford lives with her father. His Museum of Avian Taxidermy was once legendary, but since its closure Gifford has become a broken man, taking refuge in the bottle. Robbed of her childhood memories by a mysterious accident, Connie is haunted by fitful glimpses of her past. A strange woman has been seen in the graveyard; and a few miles away, at Chichester’s Graylingwell Asylum, two female patients have, inexplicably, disappeared. As a storm hits the Sussex landscape, old wounds are about to be opened as one woman, intent on revenge, attempts to liberate another from the crimes of the past.

The result is a Gothic tale of retribution and justice.

“It has been absolutely brilliant,” Róisín says, “and it does feel like the perfect time to be doing this. I just feel like now is the right moment for this story for all that it involves and I think there’s something about having waited for it that makes it all the more special.”

In some ways the pandemic has brought things into closer focus: “One of the things that came to the fore during Covid was injustice involving women. It was very hard to miss. There were constant stories about violence towards girls and women and of course we also had the Sarah Everard murder. It just feels that these issues are very much to the fore in the current climate and in this piece we are looking at a young woman distanced from justice because she is the victim. She is punished because she’s the victim.

“There is a young woman who one night comes across a group called the Corvid Club, a group of men of all different ages, and they think that they have actually killed her, but what happens is that the victim is helped by the taxidermist who then sends her to Graylingwell, the asylum, where she was helped but also hidden. Ten years after the act she has left Graylingwell and is pursuing a revenge-driven path. That is the background of the story but front and centre you have this girl called Connie whose memories have been suppressed. She witnessed this act as a ten-year-old but she does not remember it...”

The play was supposed to have been part of the 2020 season which was cancelled when the pandemic first struck. Róisín, who is joint artistic director of Clean Break, became attached to the project about a year ago.

A big part of the excitement is in bringing the landscape of the novel onto the stage.

“We are really really embracing how vast and how lonely that landscape is. It is going to be big and broad and deep and wide on the stage and hopefully bringing in lots of elements of that landscape as part of this Gothic story.

“We’ve had some amazing days out, some road trips looking at the scenery. I didn’t know this area before, definitely not the countryside. I had been to the theatre but the area itself was new to me and it was very exciting to have the chance to discover it and go to the marshes. We were just blown away by the landscape and those reeds that were bigger than I am. Kate is so devoted to that landscape and I love the way that she encapsulates it in the novel and that’s what we’re trying to bring to the stage.

“It is great to be working with Kate. A huge amount of this is about Chichester for Kate, and I consider what she has achieved as a novelist but also in terms of her campaigning work with the women’s prize as really revolutionary. She has completely and utterly changed the face of women’s literature and I do think she is a brilliant novelist.”

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