Gothic chillers are rare in modern theatre but Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black is still running in London 33 years after opening. Producers are understandably alert to the hope of making lightning strike twice.
Daniel Evans, boss at Chichester, has commissioned Kate Mosse to adapt her blood-soaked mystery, set around the local West Sussex marshlands during the record wet spring of 1912. In The Taxidermist’s Daughter, Connie has taken over the stuffing of animals her father is too drunk to see. Shivers reliably build through ingredients including Connie’s elusive sense of childhood trauma, a creepy clique of town grandees, and mysterious women seen among the reeds – all against the escalating threat of what we now call an extreme weather event.
