Like mother, like son? Susie Blake’s Shirley and Jason Durr’s gangland boss Jonny ‘The Cyclops’ Drinkwater in Torben Betts’s murky comedy thriller Murder At Midnight
TORBEN Betts, once an Alan Ayckbourn protégé at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, is now carving out a niche in savagely dark comic thrillers with “Murder” at play in the title and on stage for touring company Original Theatre.
After the leaden ghost story of Murder In The Dark, set on the Yorkshire Moors, in September 2023, Betts returns to York Theatre Royal – he attended a Q&A on Wednesday – with what director director Philip Franks says is “a difficult play to describe”. “Feydeau, rewritten by Tarantino perhaps,” he settles on in his programme note. Or maybe Joe Orton refracted though Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen?
Describing Murder At Midnight as a companion piece to the first part of what is rumoured to be a trilogy, Franks reckons the new play is many things. Murder mystery. Farce. Gangster thriller in the vein of Jez Butterworth or Philip Ridley. Revenge drama. Darkly funny dissection of family life. All true, but frustratingly it ends up is less than the sum of these promising but clunky parts.
What separates Murder At Midnight more from the Miss Marples and Poirot world of crime dramas is the undertow of family drama tugging away beneath the increasingly absurdist violence. As Franks puts it, Murder At Midnight brings together a group of “lost and desperate people looking for love and willing to risk everything for it, even if the search ends in death” (spoiler alert).
Welcome to the swish, all-mod-cons home of southern drug baron and pig farmer Jonny ‘The Cyclops’ Drinkwater (Jason Durr), where Betts gives designer Colin Falconer the challenge of creating five locations in an open-plan design that facilitates quick scene changes in the tradition of farce (but without the usual profusion of doors).
Murder At Midnight director Philip Franks
At Paradise Farm, we see a sitting room, kitchen area, exterior passageway, master bedroom with a giant flamingo print, and Jonny’s man cave, where the back wall is dominated by an homage to his favourite pop star, Robbie Williams.
Cristina (Ukrainian actress Iryna Poplavska in her UK theatrical debut as a Rumanian home help) is in a flap on her phone with petty crook Mister Fish (Callum Balmforth, later to enter dressed as Coco the Clown, later still to reveal his name is Russell). She is trying to put Jonny’s mum, Shirley (Susie Blake) to bed, but Shirley is seeing things (devils mainly) and she may or may not be suffering from dementia.
Cristina’s phone, unlike everyone else’s mobile, only works in the passageway, one of the ways that Betts employs for engineering entrances and exits. He also applies another farce trope, whereby two sets of people are in the spacious house at the same time but unaware of the other.
Unbeknown to The Only Way Is Essex-style girlfriend Lisa (Katie McGlynn), Jonny has arrived home early from a trip and is in the man cave with his henchman, Trainwreck Spencer (Peter Moreton), a “man of unimpeachable character”, he insists, but beholden to a coke habit.
Lisa, meanwhile, has snuck back from a party. A fancy-dress party, which explains why she is dressed as a nun, and heading to the bedroom with her is the “vicar”, Paul (Max Bowden), her bit on the side, who also unbeknown to her, is an undercover cop investigating the murder of Jonny’s first wife, Alex (fed to the pigs apparently). Truly, she was for the chop, you could say.
At your service: Max Bowden’s “vicar” Paul and Katie McGlynne’s “nun” Lisa in Murder At Midnight
Scenes are conducted in parallel, out of sight and hearing of each other, but not for us of course. All the while, Blake’s Shirley has a habit of turning up unannounced and seeing everything. Keep an eye on her; she turns out to be a suffocating mother in the vein of Greek tragedies as Blake gives the most rounded performance.
Betts weaves so many styles and strands into his comedy thriller, even cultural social comment (such as putdowns of Coldplay and class distinction), but without uniting them satisfyingly to find his own voice, and for all seasoned director Philip Franks’ own panache as a comedic actor, the timing is too often off in Act One. Everything has to work just that little bit too hard.
Act Two is slicker, wilder, more violent too, but frankly sillier as it descends into a modern-day Jacobean tragedy with the obligatory pile-up of bodies. There is a nagging feeling throughout that it could and should be so much better. Only Falconer’s set is top notch.
Is Torben Betts getting away with murder, on the evidence of two disappointing plays? Thursday’s matinee was packed, so the answer would appear to be yes. Hopefully, Murder instalment number three will be a killer, however.
Original Theatre in Murder At Midnight, York Theatre Royal, today at 7.30pm, tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.