The Silver Gull Play Award Winner Announced this evening and the winner was Alistair Brown for his play Next to Godliness. The story of three women at various stages of life, all attempting to survive and thrive within the male-dominated industry of professional murder.
Carmen is a young woman with a sharp intellect and a complete lack of focus. Sophia is a highly-strung older woman possessed of an almost ruthless practicality, returning to the workforce after her husband is incapacitated by a stroke.
The two women work as cleaners for a criminal syndicate, disposing of bodies and forensic evidence. When they attend a particularly blood-soaked crime scene and find one of the participants still clinging to life, they find themselves in a difficult position. Disposing of all the evidence technically includes this man, who they decide to refer to as Goon Number Seven, but they are both unwilling to finish him off themselves.
Luckily they live in the era of outsourcing and decide to call in a professional.
Ferryman is a killer by trade, with a tendency towards speaking in business jargon and corporate slogans. We meet her in the middle of coaching her latest mark into writing his own suicide note, but she is willing to wrap that job up quickly in order to answer the urgent call she receives from Sophia.
Throughout the play the protagonists are unknowingly haunted by the unquiet dead, three creatures who manifest in the bodies of the crime scene victims and form a Chorus of sorts. These three entities delight in the increasing conflict, and provide grim context to each scene by likening them to stories from Greek myth.
Scene three finds Carmen alone with Goon Number Seven, waiting for Sophia to return from ordering in an assassin.
WHAT THE JUDGES SAID
This refreshingly inventive play about the empowerment of women is a social satire clothed in grotesque farce and woven into the bloodiness of Greek myth and tragedy. It turns worn aphorisms and cliches upside down and has moments of illuminating truth. So often we look back to the Greeks for insight into the tragedies of passionate violence. Or now to the Irish for the dark comedy of violence. This play brings both together with the blackest of humour.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Alastair spent four years studying acting at Flinders University Drama Centre before deciding, the moment that he graduated, that he’d rather be a writer instead. Since then he has written novels, stage plays, screenplays, reviews, and even a couple of songs. His short story Remembrance In Skin recently appeared in issue 150 of Aurealis magazine, he won a Best Writing award for his short play Flat in the Melbourne Short + Sweet play festival, and his comic book reviews appear on the YouTube channel Kapow! (which he also co-hosted for several years). Alastair lives in Sydney, New South Wales with his wife, and several cats who have started to demand he include them in everything he writes.
