REVIEW: Loving Ashes - Sun and Wine Arts Company

Loving Ashes

Presented by: Sun and Wine Arts Company

Venue: PIP Theatre

Date attended: 20 August 2026

Writer & Director: Hamish Chappell

Stage Manager: Emma King

Composer & Production Assistant: Laura Sinclair

Puppet Maker: Myah Collins

Sound Designer: Taigh Saville

Cast: Aaron Whitney, Hamish Chappell, Josie Yar, Rose Swanepoel, and Tim Buckney

“Don’t worry, we’ll take it from here.”

There are some jobs most of us are very grateful somebody else is willing to do, while we’d rather not think too much about what they involve. The vets who have to euthanise our pets. The people who collect them afterwards. The souls who shave a final lock of fur, prepare the body, cremate it, gather the ashes, and return what remains to a grieving family. Important work, certainly. But not a career path many would circle on the guidance counsellor’s form.

Hamish Chappell works in pet aftercare. Yes, that is his real job. And he has now written a play about it. Loving Ashes is a deeply personal verbatim piece, weaving together interviews and stories from pet owners, vets, and veterinary nurses. The staged reading examines the enormous space animals can occupy in our lives, and what happens when suddenly that space becomes empty.

Aaron Whitney opens with the story of Logan, a dog whose loss drops us straight into the emotional deep end. Whitney was visibly weeping as he spoke, bringing a rawness to the testimony that was difficult to separate from genuine emotion. In verbatim theatre, performers are entrusted with somebody else’s memories, sometimes their most painful ones, and Whitney treated this first story with enormous tenderness. These aren’t fictional backstories written to generate tears on cue. Somebody actually loved Logan. Somebody actually submitted these words.

From there, the stories arrive in fragments. Some begin with how an animal entered a person’s life. Others begin at the end. Pets pass from old age, illness, or accidents; others disappear or are taken by other animals. Together, the stories capture the strange and varied circumstances through which animals enter and eventually leave our lives.

Between the scenes, recorded voices rattle off lists of pet names. Bella pops up often. As does Matilda... (apparently I gave my own cat the feline equivalent of naming a child Charlotte). The stories reveal all the different jobs our animals quietly take on: companion, emotional support, substitute child, and sometimes the creature that gets a person through a period they might not otherwise have survived.

One person describes their animal with the words, “I’ve never felt as loved or needed before or since.” They call him “a once in a lifetime dog”, adding, “I wouldn’t have made it without him.” These pets aren’t interchangeable household accessories. Each relationship is specific, and so is each loss. Much like human death, there is very little fairness or order to losing an animal. There is also the added difficulty that our pets cannot tell us what is wrong, how much pain they’re in, or what they need. As one person puts it, “The waiting game is horrible.”

The vets and veterinary nurses offer another side of the grief surrounding animal death. One explains that euthanasia never becomes easy, despite performing it regularly. But there is comfort in giving an animal a peaceful passing with its owner beside them. Their stories also reveal the emotional residue carried by those who deal with death as part of their profession. Like doctors, nurses, and first responders, they may do this work every day, but certain cases will stay on their hearts.

Then there is Hamish Chappell himself. While the rest of the cast primarily read, he demonstrates parts of his work: receiving the bag containing the “pet”, shaving fur, preparing the body for cremation, and transferring the ashes into an urn. He handles each bag with remarkable delicacy. For a staged reading, there’s more physical activity than I expected. Chappell’s repeated aftercare tasks provide a visual thread through the testimonies: while one person talks about the animal they lost, he works through what happens after the goodbye. The intimacy of PIP Theatre suits this format particularly well, placing us close to both the storytellers and Chappell’s careful handling of each “animal”.

There is also, thankfully, plenty to laugh at! Pet ownership would be badly represented by 75 straight minutes of solemn remembrance. Pets steal your food, destroy things, develop bizarre habits, and survive situations they absolutely shouldn’t. Then came a story I recognised very quickly... Mine!

Before attending Loving Ashes, I had submitted the story of my cat Ginger, never knowing whether it would make the final piece. Ginger was my apparently invincible ginger cat, determined to test the nine-lives theory as thoroughly as possible before eventually making it to 18. Hearing Rose Swanepoel tell his story back to me was surreal and gave me the unusual experience of verbatim theatre from the other side. I knew what I found funny, where the emotion sat, and, of course, what Ginger meant to me. And Swanepoel understood all of that perfectly. She didn’t smother the funny parts beneath sadness or turn the sad parts too syrupy. Her shifts in tone matched the way I remember speaking about him. It was affection, amusement, disbelief, and grief all tangled together. Chappell had shaped my words into something theatrical without making the story feel as though it belonged to somebody else.

That experience also gave me a greater appreciation for the responsibility carried by the whole cast. Aaron Whitney, Josie Yar, Rose Swanepoel, and Tim Buckney aren’t creating fictional characters with conveniently constructed emotional arcs. They are temporarily carrying other people’s grief, humour, memories, and love. All four stepped into the production late, yet each is an animated, engaged storyteller, shifting naturally between humour and grief across dozens of memories. Yar, in particular, had committed an impressive amount of material to memory, giving her sections a freedom beyond the script in hand.

Dogs dominate the collection of stories, with one bird and a couple of cats breaking up the canine majority. As a cat person, I maintain this constitutes a statistical injustice! Although I will concede that the dogs had some very beautiful stories. Even Myah Collins’ gorgeous dog puppet had me involuntarily going “awww!"

If Loving Ashes develops into a fuller production, I would love to see projected photographs of the animals whose stories are being told on the white cloth of the cremator set piece. The descriptions are already vivid, but revealing the real face attached to a name after hearing their story could add another connection between testimony and subject. A more developed lighting design could also help mark transitions between memories and create more visual variation.

The play eventually returns to Chappell. People often tell him, “I couldn’t do what you do.” And he understands why. He admits, “I feel bad that I make a living off the worst day in someone’s life. But someone has to do it.” It would be easy for a play centred around pet cremation to become relentlessly bleak, but Loving Ashes instead becomes an argument for care. The people who perform these jobs step into a moment when somebody else cannot continue. They take responsibility for something precious at the exact point its owner has to let go. The ashes may be neutral. The life before them certainly wasn’t.

Loving Ashes is tender, amusing, confronting, and deeply affectionate towards both the animals we love and the people trusted with them at the end. After spending years feeding them, cleaning up after them, worrying about them, laughing at them, talking to them, and loving them beyond all proportion, the final kindness is entrusting them to somebody else’s care and hearing: “Don’t worry, we’ll take it from here.”