Torben Betts

Torben Betts
Born (1968-02-10) 10 February 1968
Stamford, Lincolnshire, UK
Occupation Dramatist

Torben Betts (born 10 February 1968 in Stamford, Lincolnshire) is an English playwright and screenwriter.

Betts attended the University of Liverpool, where he read English Literature and English Language, and originally trained to become an actor but later changed course to begin writing plays.[1] Betts stated that part of the reason for this transition was the difficulty he faced as an actor without an agent and that playwriting allowed him to "exercise all my instincts as an actor without actually having to live the life".[2] In 1999 Alan Ayckbourn invited him to be the resident dramatist at Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre.

A Listening Heaven premiered there that year before a second production took place at the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum in 2001. The play was nominated as the TMA Best New play that year. During this period Betts was enjoying success on the London fringe at the Battersea Arts Centre with plays like Incarcerator, a drama in rhyming couplets and The Biggleswades at the White Bear Theatre Club. Also in that year (2001), his play Clockwatching initiated a series of co-productions between the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond and The Stephen Joseph Theatre, producing theatre in the round. Betts works in two very distinct styles: a darkly comic social realism, reminiscent of the plays of Ayckbourn or Mike Leigh, and a more tragic, poetic style of a kind associated with dramatists such as Howard Barker.

His brutal anti-capitalist satire The Unconquered, in a touring production by Scotland’s Stellar Quines Theatre Company, won the 2007 Best New Play award at the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland.

Critical reception for Betts's plays has been mostly very positive: The Daily Telegraph claims he has a "profound and highly original theatrical voice", while Liz Lochhead (the former makar or national poet of Scotland) suggests he "is just about the most original and extraordinary writer of drama we have."[3] Michael Billington in his **** Guardian review of Invincible commented that "Torben Betts should be a bigger name."[4]

Invincible played at the Orange Tree Theatre March/April 2014 to great critical and popular acclaim and is the fourth of his plays to premiere at that theatre, following Clockwatching (2001), The Company Man (2010) and Muswell Hill (2012). The production transferred to London's St. James Theatre in July 2014, again receiving glowing reviews across the board (see the review in the London Evening Standard, Paul Taylor's review and Alice Jones' interview with the playwright also in the Independent).

He also wrote the screenplay for the British independent feature film Downhill, which was released in cinemas nationwide on 30 May 2014. The Independent said "his screenplay for this engaging, quintessentially British road/rambling movie combines knockabout comedy with surprisingly bleak observations."[5]

A revival of his acclaimed 2012 play Muswell Hill transferred to London's Park Theatre in February 2015, while his political tragedy, centring on the 2015 General Election, (What Falls Apart) opened at Newcastle's Live Theatre in April of that year. A production of his version of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull opened at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre on 24 June 2015, directed by Matthew Dunster. (See the review in Time Out.) He has also adapted Get Carter for Northern Stage, Newcastle, where it opened in February 2016, garnering 4- and 5-star reviews. See Betts' article about adapting the Ted Lewis novel in the Independent and the Guardian review.

The Original Theatre Company embarked on a four-month UK tour of Invincible in 2016, which it will remount in 2017. His latest play (The National Joke) played in rep at the Stephen Joseph Theatre over that summer. See the BBC's interview with the playwright, June 2016.

A major tour of Invincible (in Spanish Invencible) takes place throughout Spain over 2016/17, including runs at the Teatro Arriaga in Bilbao and at the Teatro Maravillas in Madrid. The play stars Maribel Verdu and Pilar Castro and has been translated into Spanish by Jordi Galcerán. In 2017 the play is also being produced in New York, Argentina, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Bibliography

Film

Selected theatre

Publications (Oberon Books)

Awards and nominations

References

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