There’s a funny story about your dad’s grave and your pet rats in the book… can you give us a précis?

My mum was a massive animal lover and when she was a schoolgirl, she found an injured baby wild rat in the grounds of her school and nursed him back to health, then kept him as a pet, named Roland. So I was raised to love rats, and I've always kept pet rats. (Um, not wild ones yeeted from bushes.) Rats ideally are kept in groups because they're very social animals - I have seven right now - but they have very short lifespans. My dad's will said, "Please bury my body" and there are a couple of essays in my book exploring burial versus cremation, and the fact graves and bone remains teach us so much about the past, and how the rise of cremation might threaten that. Richmond council (where I lived) agreed to put his grave in my name so I could get the local rate, even though my dad didn't live there, because I made the argument that I wanted to have him buried near me so I could visit. I was quite intrigued by the idea of being a 'landowner' even if it was just six feet of soil, so I came up with different plans for how to use that land. I toyed with growing tomatoes on it - Death Tomatoes - but settled for roses and lavender. Then my beloved pet rat Caryl Churchill died, and it seemed obvious to utilise my dad's grave as her permanent resting place. At the time of writing, there are seven little rat corpses in my dad's grave, and I believe he would appreciate the company in the afterlife. And I like the idea that in a thousand years, archaeologists might find my dad's grave and be intrigued by this mystery of why a man would be interred with seven tiny rat coffins. I have a mental image of my dad's remains in whatever the 30th century's version of the British Museum, under the heading "The Rat King of South London", and that in doing so, it will have given my dad a kind of immortality.

How do you feel about the traditional western funeral?

Traditional western funerals tend to be quite formal and they can be impersonal. My dad wasn't religious so I hired a celebrant to conduct his funeral, which was very awkward because a musician friend of mine played a song my dad loved called 'A Song for John' (which Yoko Ono wrote for John Lennon). But because the celebrant had never met my dad, she got confused and started referring to my dad as John. Very embarrassing as she accidentally ended up giving the impression that after marrying my dad, my mum had run off with some bloke named John! I'd never really thought about funerals before that - you don't, really, until you have to organise one - and I sort of assumed that funerals were like weddings and could only be conducted by someone qualified and official. But if you're not a member of a church or other religious group, you likely will end up with a funeral conducted by a stranger, which is very impersonal. I conducted my mother's entire funeral service myself, writing and delivering the eulogy alone and inviting the guest readers onto the stage. To this day it's the most adult, most challenging, but also the most rewarding thing I've ever done. But it's still so scary and lonely standing on a stage in an impersonal "multi-denominational chapel" somewhere with everyone staring at you. I'm sure it's different if you're an active member of a church and the funeral is in your own regular church. So I think, especially with the receding of the Christian Church from British daily life, that we need to find new ways to make funerals more personal and more supportive of the bereaved. There was a slightly unhinged reality TV show called 'Best Funeral Ever' which featured things like a horror movie-themed funeral, a country music-themed funeral, and even a candy-themed funeral where the casket was dipped in chocolate. That doesn't sound appetising to me, but funerals should be less solemn and more a celebration of the dead person as an individual.

You’ve been to Mexico’s Day of the Dead… what was it like?

My first response is: a big, loud, hot, colourful, party! But Mexico is a huge and diverse country, and one of the most valuable and interesting things I learned from travelling was how ways of marking Día de Muertos differs. Día de Muertos lasts for several days so I was able to travel and experience different celebrations. I landed in Mexico City, where everything is so big and celebratory it just feels like a huge festival. But the famous Mexico City Day of the Dead Parade is actually a recent invention; it was created by filmmaker Sam Mendes for the Bond movie 'Spectre', which featured a massive parade with decorated floats. The movie did take a lot of influence from real Day of the Dead celebrations, such as the use of La Catrina imagery (a female skeleton), people in elaborate outfits, and lots of cempasúchil (marigolds) everywhere. But Mexico City didn't actually have a Day of the Dead parade. The first real-life Mexico City parade took place in 2016, because of the success of the movie, and now people travel from all over the world to see it. People in Mexico City certainly have embraced this new tradition, merging it with older established traditions like building Offrendas (altars). I then travelled to Oaxaca for the second night of Día de Muertos, where I was able to participate in more traditional celebrations, and observe locals visiting graveyards to spend quite contemplative time with their loved ones. It was fascinating seeing the differences, and the way pre-Hispanic and indigenous traditions had merged with Catholic influence, and later with contemporary global factors such as Halloween - in Mexico City in particular, I saw a surprising number of traditional Western Halloween iconography, even stalls selling Mike Myers and other Hollywood horror movie villain masks! The weirdest thing was going into a Starbucks and seeing mass-produced Starbucks brand pan de muertos, a skull-shaped traditional bread. The most heartbreaking was Dia de los Angelitos (Day of the Little Angels) which takes place on 31st October and and is the day during Dia de Muertos that's dedicated to children and babies who have died. That was an extremely emotional thing to witness, because it reminds you that despite the celebratory nature of Día de Muertos, it's not a party, it is a sacred way of remembering those we have lost. Ultimately however different people and different cultures mark death, it's all to cope with the pain of grief, and to keep our lost loved ones alive in our hearts and our memories.

How has your studies into death and grief affected your work as a playwright?

My first play was loosely adapted from my MSc dissertation (which was about the gendering of mental health) and my background as an anthropologist continues to inspire and inform my playwriting work. Anthropology is the study of human beings and I believe theatre exists for the same reason: so that we can try to better understand ourselves and others. But I always have to be careful not to make my plays too academic, and to find ways to balance my research with creating character-driven stories. The research should inform the characters, rather than characters existing to spout information the writer learned during the process of researching the play! Only two of my plays ('Unicorn' which was a commission from the Bush Theatre and 'Batman' which was a commission from Chronic Insanity) have overtly addressed death and grief. But a lot of my plays have addressed these themes obliquely: my upcoming play 'Puppy' (which will be receiving a four-week run in spring 2025, with some very exciting casting) is a queer female-led romantic comedy about identity and existence, and the importance of grabbing joy where you can find it.

Have you learned anything about grief and loss that you particularly want readers to take away from your book, that perhaps might help them if they’re in the throes of it?

The very best thing I learned was that there's a small town in Colorado where, after a Norwegian immigrant with plans to start his own cryonics facility was forced to abandon his father's frozen body, adopted the 'pop-sicle' as a town icon, and for more than twenty years the town has held an annual 'Frozen Dead Guy Day" with death-related games (like coffin racing), a parade, and the local ice cream parlour even releases a limited edition flavour featuring a core of blue berry-flavoured sorbet surrounded by crushed Oreos spiked with gummy worms. And that might seem flippant, but the reason I love it is because it reminds me that death can be anything we want it to be. It can be a celebration, it can be funny, it can be a way of bringing people together. Once you're dead you're dead and none of us know what happens after we're dead, so why worry about it? Grief, bereavement, all the ways of marking the fact someone has died - all that is for the benefit of the living, not the dead. The dead are gone. I accepted a major theatre job right after my mum died and I did receive some judgement over that, but it saved my life in the most intense stages of grief. So do whatever you need to do to cope and thrive, and if that means treating death as a celebration the way they do in Mexico City, if it means gathering to eat food together the way we do in Jewish shivas, or even if it just means eating ice cream, that's fine and that's your choice and don't let anyone tell you that you're grieving wrong.

There is no one way to grieve, and grief has no dos or don'ts, no wrongs or rights, and no timeline. Coming to terms with grief may be a lifelong process, and that process isn't linear. Grief can hit you in waves when you least expect it. But it also won't hurt forever. Don't be afraid to talk about grief, and also don't be afraid to talk about death. In my experience, people are relatively comfortable talking about grief in a somewhat abstract way, talking about how much you miss a person, but are less comfortable talking about things like, what it's like to stand in a morgue looking at a loved one's body. And it's fine and normal for people to be discomfited, because most people haven't had those experiences and our culture treats the bodily realities of death as extremely taboo. But you might feel that you want and need to talk about those aspects, and you should never feel ashamed of that. Keep talking to people, and if the people in your life are uncomfortable or don't understand, find people who do. Organisations like the grief peer support group Table 11, or the plethora of Death Cafes all over the world, can all be invaluable sources of support or places to have open and honest conversations about subjects that are often taboo. And also, it's okay to laugh. It's okay to smile and be joyful, and have moments where you completely forget that you're supposed to be grieving.

Finally, have you read anything recently you just simply have to recommend?

I'm a Caitlin Doughty superfan so I can't not mention her. All three of her books ("Smoke Gets in your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematorium"; "From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death" and "Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death") are must-reads for anyone interested in an anthropological approach to death, and I'm excited for her new book on the Titanic.

I've always been a big David Sedaris fan and his 2022 collection 'Happy-Go-Lucky' is a lot more reflective than his previous books, exploring his sister's suicide and his father's death in a way that merges his typical spiky humour with real nuance and empathy.

I love Richard Powers, and was moved by his Pulitzer-winning and Booker Prize-shortlisted novel 'The Overstory'(an exquisite love letter to trees and the importance of forests), but his newest novel Bewilderment (which was also Booker Prize shortlisted) resonated with me much more. It combines all the things I love - vaguely sci-fi/near future setting; forests and wilderness; neuroscience - with an incredibly subtle exploration of grief and loss, as a single father tries to raise his neurodivergent son after his wife's death, until a breakthrough in neuroscience technology offers the chance to bring at least part of her back to existence.