Peter is ‘Darius Devine’, a washed-up old television medium who we first see rehearsing his tricks of manipulating bereaved people in an audience. He had been on his way down but a stint in Celebrity Big Brother has set him up for a new show.
The power behind him, it is quickly revealed, is his relentlessly driven wife and manager Susannah. After years of playing in working men’s clubs and civic halls, ‘years in the wilderness,’ now he has got a new TV show that she has moved heaven and earth to arrange, nothing must get in its way or he is finished – career, marriage, home, the lot.
With the inevitability of these things, in comes Laura, a young production assistant he has been having an affair with, who blackmails him with the WhatsApp messages ‘where you asked me to do all those horrible things to you with tinned fruit.’ Pathetically, she really believes in his mystical powers and wants him to contact her dead mother for her.
Rufus Hound plays Peter with full-fronted TV star insincerity. His gloriously bonkers mother-in-law is played with very proper affronted dignity by Susie Blake who is a delight to see. She, to Peter’s horror, turns out to be a real medium, actually in contact with the dead, including a dead person he has killed.
This is all played out in real time in a single location: a middle-class kitchen and living room in this case, with the hero on stage all the time, facing repeated, unexpected challenges. This may be a frothy modern comedy but it works because Betts has learned the lessons of classic drama.
On way to the climax Betts takes pot shots at celebrity sleaze and ‘reality’ shows, switching from comedy to pathos in single scenes.
Philip Franks’ direction keeps the action at a steady pace, we are always wondering who is going to come in to break through the most recent tissue of lies. The Other Side of Murder  was a perfectly good play by the end of the first half. During the second it becomes a real cracker.
We have come to expect unanticipated surprises with plays by Torben Betts and this is no exception. It would be unfair to give too much away, you’ll just have to see it.
Venue: Churchill Theatre Bromley
Playwright: Torben Betts
Director: Philip Franks
Cast: Rufus Hound, Susie Blake, Carla Mendonca, Aisha Jawando, Beth Lilly
Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes with a 15 minute interval
Until: 7 November 2026