Torben Betts
| Torben Betts | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
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. 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". 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.
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