Torben Betts gets about. This year I've seen A Listening Heaven in Edinburgh and Incarcerator in Battersea. His latest play, Clockwatching, opens in Richmond before moving to Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre; Betts is an Ayckbourn protege who shares his mentor's bleakly comic vision of family life.
Betts also follows Ayckbourn in suggesting there's nothing like a festive ritual to expose domestic misery. Starting on New Year's Eve, Clockwatching explores the discontents of a northern family who make the house of Atreus look jolly. Dad is indifferent to his dying, off-stage wife. Daughter Anna has to cope with an autistic child and her hapless husband, Duncan. Her brother, Paul, is a loutish would-be pop-star whose marriage to actress Sarah is sabotaged by the latter's love for Duncan, which leads to catastrophic violence.
Tolstoy said that "all happy families resemble each other but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Betts implies that it is our unhappiness that is universal. He is good at conveying the lies and embarrassments of domestic life - there's a funny moment when Duncan finds himself unwittingly reading soft porn to his mother-in-law.
While Betts has a sharp ear for the bruising banalities of family life, he rarely lets the outside world impinge. He could learn from his own A Listening Heaven, which interwove art, science, religion and ecology into a study of domestic desperation. Plays succeed in so far as they show the complex interaction of the individual with society.
But Sam Walters' production has the right pressure-cooker quality, and the performances are outstanding. Betts writes with naturalistic exactness; what he needs to do is show that even the unhappiest family is subject to periodic social invasion.
Until May 5. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
