This is an excellent gothic romp of a novel, and Mosse sets it in her native Sussex, where the marshes are both haunting and threatening, and the sea is prone to dramatic flooding. Her favourite plays include Hangmen by Martin McDonagh, and A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood.

Róisín McBrinn’s production is clodhopping, unevenly acted, and occasionally unintentionally hilarious – and its pace is deadly. 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. I was unlucky enough to be near two audience members (shoutout to the ladies in Row F) who decided to WhatsApp their way throughthe performance; I’d have loved to fling their smartphones into the deluged Fishbourne Marshes. 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. Now, Andrzej Goulding’s video design and Prema Mehta’s lighting flood the stage so terrifyingly that we almost fumble under seats for lifejackets.

Photograph: Teri Pengilley for the Observer Kate Mosse grew up in the slightly sinister Fishbourne marshlands she describes. Pearl Chanda as Cassie, a woman defined by mystery, avoids the floaty tone that such roles risk, finding psychological specificity. And after a dead woman is found floating near their home, Connie is caught up in a web of mystery, blackmail and murder. 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.

Though some viewers might find later scenes a bit much, I felt it was tastefully done; to be fair, you can’t expect a play about taxidermy and trauma to be completely sanitised. A dark but thrilling play about country superstition, power dynamics and artistry, adapted by Kate Mosse from her Gothic novel, and rightly debuting in the Sussex county where the action takes place. 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.The acting is otherwise pedestrian, with the liveliest performances coming from Akai Osei as a sharp-witted mudlark, and Pearl Chanda as a wild avenger in a veiled black hat, swooping on the hypocritical local burghers like a raven, gimlet-eyed, clawing and cawing. And a woman who is believed less than the men around her, were she to have had the opportunity even to be heard. 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. We have published a new cookies policy, which you should read to find out more about the cookies we use. I don’t always remember” – in the way of a narrator’s usually candid relationship with the reader, rather than more ambiguous theatre speech, leaving actors space to grace-notes with voice and face.

Kate Mosse omits mention of the year’s defining events – the sinking of the Titanic, the suffragette movement, industrialisation – and focuses, instead, on the events of a small, insular, marshland town, Fishbourne, in Sussex, and its occupants. Sinéad Diskin’s sound has a vaguely Wicker Man-ish folksy menace, and Andrzej Goulding’s video impressively conjures dark, rain-lashed nights and a climactic flood. Robbed of her childhood memories by a mysterious accident, Connie is haunted by fitful glimpses of her past.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.

Kate Mosse’s gothic yarn owes plenty to both Collins and Hill: there are spooky goings on, treacherous tidal waters and asylum incarcerations. 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. Paul Wills’s set is a lovely puzzle of rising and sliding parts, fluidly introducing medical and museum vitrines, homes, offices and coastland. It starts with a spurt of high theatricality: smoke and spotlights and singing and wildlife, all amid a deluge of rain in a Sussex churchyard. 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.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.