FROM THE DIRECTORS

There are stories that simply entertain, and then there are stories that do something far more dangerous — they hold up a mirror. The Taxidermist's Daughter is the latter. When I first encountered this material, what struck me was not its gothic atmosphere or its intricate plotting, but its radical insistence on telling the truth about silenced women, buried histories, and the violence of being unseen. In a world still reckoning with whose voices carry weight and whose are simply — like the specimens in Gifford's workshop — preserved but never truly heard, this story felt not like a period piece but a provocation.

The themes at the heart of this work are achingly contemporary. Connie Gifford lives in a house full of beautiful, frozen things — creatures stripped of life and arranged to look alive. It is one of the most precise metaphors I know for what society has so often done to young women: shaped them into something pleasing, something still, something that exists for the gaze of others rather than for themselves. To bring this story to a modern audience is to ask them a question they may not be comfortable answering: who are we still doing this to?

What I witnessed in rehearsal again and again was something I can only describe as discovery. These young performers came to the work carrying everything their generation carries: the noise of social media, the pressure of performance, the exhausting fluency in other people's expectations of them. And The Taxidermist's Daughter gave them somewhere to put all of it. In Connie's story — her fragmented memory, her determination to unearth what has been hidden, her refusal to remain decorative — they found permission. Permission to be unresolved. Permission to be fierce. Permission to take up space on stage without apology.

Finding your voice as an actor is not simply a technical exercise in projection and diction. It is an act of excavation. It requires you to ask: what do I actually think? What do I actually feel? What truth, if I were brave enough, would I tell? The gothic world of the play — with its fog and its secrets and its dead weight of the past pressing on the living — creates the ideal crucible for that excavation. There is nowhere to hide in a room full of mounted creatures staring back at you. You must become present. You must become real.

I have watched these young performers grow not just as actors but as people who trust themselves. The girl who could barely hold a pause in week one is now commanding silence. The boy who hid behind technical competence has learned to let something true slip through. They have discovered — and this is the gift the play keeps giving — that vulnerability is not weakness on stage. It is the only currency that buys genuine connection with an audience.

The Taxidermist's Daughter matters now because we are still, collectively, deciding what to do with the things that have been buried. The secrets that communities keep to protect their own comfort. The women whose inconvenient truths are labelled hysteria or madness. The children who know exactly what is wrong but lack the authority to make adults believe them. Connie Gifford fights her way toward the truth with the particular ferocity of someone who has been told, all her life, that she is unreliable. There is not a young person in this cast who does not understand that feeling in some register of their experience.

My hope is that when you watch this company — these gifted, courageous young artists — you will see not just Edwardian Sussex but something closer. Something that asks what we choose to preserve, what we choose to revive, and what we finally allow to breathe.

The specimens in Gifford's workshop are beautiful. But they are not alive.

Connie is.

So are these actors.

I am grateful for both.