‘I’ve very much enjoyed turning 60,” says Kate Mosse, tipping several sachets of sugar into a cup of takeaway coffee. It’s 9am, and the bestselling novelist and founder of the Women’s prize for fiction has travelled up to London from her home on the Sussex coast to sit in on a rehearsal of her first full-length play, staged at Chichester Festival theatre.
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. And not just any piece, but a large-cast gothic revenge drama, with many mildewed basements of its own, which will open the spring season of a venue that Mosse has loved since she was a child. A debut play, written and directed by women, launching a season on the main stage of a major regional producing house is “as rare as crows’ teeth”, they laugh. “No pressure, then, no pressure at all!”
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. Sea water surges through the marshes and carrion birds gather ominously above the local church as long-submerged evils bubble to the surface, confronting the eponymous heroine Connie Gifford with memories she lost years earlier in a mysterious childhood accident.
Mosse wrote the novel at a time when the task of caring for her elderly parents meant she could no longer spend long stretches of each year in the French city of Carcassonne, which – she says – gave her the freedom to become a writer, and was the inspiration for her Burning Chambers series of historical novels. It took her back to the marshes where she used to play with her two sisters, and into local news archives, where she found reports of the havoc wreaked by the wettest year on record. “The Titanic had just sunk, but nobody was talking about that,” she says. “All the reports were of people who had drowned because they slipped in the dark on the way to the village to buy something.”
The novel was published in 2014, when unusually wet weather didn’t seem as sinister as it does today, but it evokes a world that – like our own – is on the brink of seismic change that will only be comprehensible in retrospect. It’s all boiled down to the story of two women’s fight to redress wrongs they have suffered at the hands of powerful and secretive men.
“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. And a woman who is believed less than the men around her, were she to have had the opportunity even to be heard. Which, again, is a very modern theme: women searching for their place, women defending their space, issues of class. It’s all very much alive. And the kind of cohesive power of a community to suppress secrets, unfortunately, is not something that’s gone away. All of those themes are highly contemporary, but also completely coherent to the period.”
The story of the transformation of The Taxidermist’s Daughter from page to stage speaks of a place that has in some ways remained proudly parochial. Locals refer to Chichester as “Chi” (pronounced “chai”, as in tea). Mosse and her writer husband, Greg, met as pupils at “Chi High”, then separated into girls’ and boys’ schools, and have spent the last quarter-century as part of a three-generation household in a sprawling Edwardian house that had done its own community service, as a hostel for soldiers, then nurses, and then an an old people’s home.
Mosse’s parents were among the local “angels” who pledged £100 each to make Chichester Festival theatre happen in the early 1960s. 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. “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.
Once she’d agreed, Evans approached McBrinn, a Dubliner with whom he’d worked at his previous theatre in Sheffield, who was now running Clean Break, a theatre company for women with lived experience of the criminal justice system. “It was like Blind Date,” says Mosse. “Yes,” McBrinn fires back. “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.”
Mosse felt she had the most to lose. “I was like, I really love her – what if she only gives me a four and we never meet again? Because doing a new play is a huge thing for any director, and I’m quite an odd first playwright, even given that I’ve done some other stuff before. It’s not like I’m a 25-year-old who needs to be mentored.”
It took some help from Mosse’s actor son, Felix, to excavate the play from the novel. “As a novelist, I’m used to being responsible for the whole world. He would often say, ‘The actor will play that, Mum.’ On the stage, you have flesh and blood, so don’t tell the actor how to act.” The big structural decision was to turn the story from a gothic mystery – which only unravels towards the end, as Connie’s memories return – to a revenge drama involving, from the outset, a second woman, Cassie, who is a shadow presence for most of the novel.
This decision meant stripping out a lot of the novelistic detail, such as the gory processes of Victorian taxidermy. “It’s the same story, but I realised it is a revenge play in the end, so it needed to be short and sharp, and packing a big punch.” says Mosse. “Why is Hamlet, which is a revenge play, so long? It’s because he’s not the right avenger. He can’t do it. If he could, we’d be out of the theatre in 45 minutes. That would be the end of it.”
For all the forfeit of novelistic detail, Mosse has caught the theatre bug. She has just delivered a book celebrating the role of women in history – due for publication in October – but her next project will be an original play. “My 50s were a decade of loss and caring, when I lost both of my parents,” she says. “I feel more hungry for new experiences now than I did 10 years ago. I think it’s very easy, particularly as a woman, to not be prepared to fail, but women have to be ambitious. You know that famous Beckett quote: ‘Fail again. Fail better’? There’s a bit – ‘No matter’ – that often gets left out, because it’s not quite as snappy. But actually, ‘No matter’ is the point.”
The Taxidermist’s Daughter is at Chichester Festival theatre, until 30 April.
