The Other Side Of Murder

Scarborough, 1999, and a long apprenticeship

Torben Betts was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, on 10 February 1968, read English literature and language at the University of Liverpool, and trained first as an actor before concluding that writing let him exercise the same instincts without having to live the life. The break came in 1999, when Alan Ayckbourn invited him to be resident dramatist at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough; his play A Listening Heaven opened there that year.

What followed was a quarter-century of work that critics kept describing as under-rewarded. Michael Billington wrote in the Guardian that Betts should be a bigger name; Liz Lochhead rated him among the most original dramatists at work. The Unconquered, an anti-Blair satire staged in 2007, won Best New Play at the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland for 2006/07, and Muswell Hill in 2012 and Invincible in 2014 built a reputation for domestic comedy with a cruel edge underneath it.

The touring thrillers are a later turn, and a deliberate one. By the time Murder in the Dark appeared, Betts was on his fourth project with Original Theatre, the company run by Alastair Whatley and Tom Hackney that specialises in mid-scale receiving-house work. Genre gave him a commercial frame for the same preoccupations — marriages rotting quietly, men who have talked their way into money they cannot justify.

Two murders first: the house style

Murder in the Dark premiered on 7 September 2023 at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, directed by Philip Franks, and marked Original Theatre's first collaboration with Trafalgar Entertainment. It put a troubled singer, Danny Sierra, played by Tom Chambers, into an isolated rural cottage on New Year's Eve after a car crash, with an extended family and a failing electricity supply. Susie Blake played Mrs Bateman. Franks was open about why the material suited him, saying horror films had been his guilty pleasure since he was a morbid child.

Murder at Midnight followed two years later, opening at the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne on 27 October 2025 and touring until 4 April 2026 with Blake alongside Jason Durr and Max Bowden. Its reception was split. Reviewers admired the pace of the script and the discipline of the ensemble, but several found it caught awkwardly between farce and thriller, generating laughs out of sudden arrows and knives rather than committing to either register. Seen and Heard International went so far as to call it theatrically ludicrous while praising the cast for working hard inside it.

The constant across all three is Blake, with a rotating co-star billed above the title — a sensible model for touring, since the brand does the selling and the guest actor refreshes it.

The medium who cannot see it coming

The Other Side of Murder is co-produced by Original Theatre and Theatr Clwyd, and opened in Theatr Clwyd's Theatr Moondance auditorium in Mold from 4 to 12 September 2026, again directed by Franks. Rufus Hound plays Peter, a fraudulent psychic trading as Darius Divine, whose television career has been revived by an appearance on a celebrity game show. The plot is a dinner that will not stay civil: his wife Susannah, played by Carla Mendonça, is about to arrive home; his estranged daughter Jen, played by Beth Lilly, has come back; and Laura, the former lover played by Aisha Jawando, turns up pregnant. Andy McLeod plays Jason and understudies Darius, with Maddy Banks, Oliver Byng and Sarah Lawn covering.

Laura's death is what starts the supernatural machinery, and Betts's best structural joke is saved for Blake. Her Miriam is the mother-in-law from the standard farce inventory — obsessed with Gilbert and Sullivan, impossible to please — and also, it turns out, the only person on stage with an actual gift. The fake is surrounded by the real thing and cannot recognise it.

The design team is the one Original Theatre has built these shows with: set by Colin Falconer, lighting by Jason Taylor, sound design and composition by Max Pappenheim, illusion design by John Bulleid, casting by Emma Sylvester. Production photography is by Manuel Harlan. Theatr Clwyd set age guidance at 14 and up, flagging mental illness, coercive behaviour, pregnancy loss and strong language, with tickets from £33.50.

Where it stands, autumn 2026

Three weeks into the run the notices had settled into a pattern: warm from the regional and specialist press, cooler from the trades, unanimous about Blake. Theatre Reviews North covered the Theatr Clwyd opening week and gave four and a half stars, calling the writing unpredictable and noting that it gripped the house while working in infidelity, ageing, social media and money. Heather Chalkley, reviewing the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre run in Guildford for Fairy Powered Productions before it closed on 19 September, went to five stars, singling out Hound's portrayal of a deluded has-been and a set cleverly built to serve both the farce and the murder.

In The Stage on 17 September 2026, Paul Vale was more measured, awarding three stars and describing an implausible but enjoyable comedy thriller with supernatural overtones — a fun spin on the genre rather than a reinvention of it. Jonathan Marshall, reviewing the New Theatre Cardiff week of 22 to 26 September for British Theatre Guide, made the sharpest craft objection: with each act running only 45 minutes, the interval gets in the way, stalling a first half already heavy with exposition, though the second builds properly as the complications stack. His verdict was easy escapism, dark themes handled lightly.

The tour runs on from Cardiff to the Queen's Theatre in Barnstaple from 29 September to 3 October, then Devonshire Park in Eastbourne, the Gaiety in Dublin from 13 to 17 October, Blackpool Grand, and the Churchill in Bromley from 2 to 7 November — the theatre where the first play in the sequence opened in 2023. Southend's Palace and the Mayflower in Southampton close the autumn leg in November. The 2027 half takes in Wycombe Swan, Derby Theatre, Malvern, Royal & Derngate in Northampton, Darlington Hippodrome, Leeds Playhouse and Salisbury Playhouse, finishing at the Belgrade in Coventry from 16 to 20 March 2027.

The craft of it on stage

These are not shows built on spectacle. The trilogy's method is a single domestic interior, a small company, and effects delivered by lighting, sound and sleight of hand rather than by scale — which is what makes it viable in a week-long receiving-house pattern where the set goes up on a Monday. Bulleid's illusion design carries the ghostly business; Pappenheim's score and sound do the rest of the unsettling, as they did in the previous two plays.

What has changed with this instalment is the target. Murder in the Dark went after a washed-up pop star and Murder at Midnight after farce mechanics; The Other Side of Murder aims at light-entertainment television itself, and at an audience's simultaneous appetite for ghost stories and for reality formats. The medium is a liar working in an industry built on the same lie, and the play lets him be found out by a force he has spent a career pretending to channel. Critics who have found the trilogy tonally unstable are not wrong, but the instability is closer to the point here than it was before.