Next to Godliness

Anna Sokolova

Oct 11

3 min read

New Theatre Sydney

@newtheatresydney

6 - 31 October 2026

Australian play written by Alastair Brown, it was the winner of the 2023 Silver Gull Play Award.

The review

This is a jazzy, classy in geometric design, speaking serious things, soaking them in prime black humor, tightly paced, smart, sharp feminist play written by a man and first-rate directed by a woman.

This story can be set in any modern Western country where corporate dress code is a must, and marketing and advertising skills are highly valued in business of any kind.

The story is centered around two lady cleaners (Sophia - Alice Livingstone and Erin @lisha.obrien), entering a room where bodies are randomly arranged on the floor, each in a deliberately obvious plastic puddle of blood. A minute before, those who are dead (@strobebby, @sophievrnewby, @harrisoncollisoates) were engagingly dancing in their stick black suits, white shirts, and wearing stylish deep-cherry-red accessories each.

The job of these cleaners is to remove all traces of a crime - that is what they are specialed at, and happy to do on a weekend for double pay. The surreal spirit is creeping up with a contrast of the practicality of late middle-aged Sophia, a sudden demonstration of Erin’s - young, enthusiastic, jumpy, smart fan of crime investigations - talent to restore the sequence of events, with uneasy walking and crawling dead, and one victim (@brendan_kater) who, unfortunately, happened to still be barely alive. The dilemma is: to keep that last one alive, or not. To assist with the task, a hitman named Ferryman (@kitty_grimalkin) called, who appeared to be tastefully dressed in a light blue suit, in high heels, a well-presented, confident, smart-mouthed woman.

This grotesque sequence of events can be easily seen as a Tarantino-style entertainment, but it holds a deeply original proposition.

Cleaning as a concept, a task often attributed to women, is raised here to the next level, it is made symbolic. Bringing it closer to the gods, three deceased accompany these females all the time. Invisible to them, they are amongst them, cutely gathering around the Ferryman, or hiding behind the large wooden frame, like a segmented wall with a hinged window, all covered with semi-transparent plastic. They are someone like Pythias, oracles, Greek chorus, whispering stories from the deep ancient legends about misjudged and unfortunate but smart and outstanding in their passion, and - so to say - courage for deep cleaning as revenge, self-protection, desperate fight for respect and dignity - Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Sphinx, Medusa, Medea. On the other side, three modern women, Sphia, Erin, and Ferryman, each with her own profoundly personal story, are there to excel in this job too. Bloody floor, humans eliminated in crime fights or by a paid order - it's all disposable waste, the removal of which makes the space cleaner. The scene between Ferryman and an over-self-confident, patronising businessman (Nathan Farrow) is terrifying in how well it reflects male-over-female domination and hilarious in how the woman wins. And if Erin’s enthusiasm might be a bit questionable at first, after her listening to Sophia’s story it is fully justified (ok, by me, but I am sure - by tens of other women in the audience; those who do not approve - ladies, you are very lucky).

The Interlacement of these co-existing worlds is playing well, building up the chain of events, but also with language, in scenes where not much is happening but a lot is being revealed, explained, planned in conversations.

“Next to Godliness” is easily a play to watch for fun, but doing so, don’t be surprised that it cuts clear in as a surgical-sharp knife and seeds some stern, if not disturbing, thoughts.