FROM marriage to death, adultery to divorce, plenty can happen in 12 months, especially when Torben Betts displays his gift for writing Greek tragedies for modern audiences in his new play Clockwatching.

"I like that Greek comparison," says Betts, who was writer in residence at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 1999, when his first full-length play, A Listening Heaven, received its premiere, five years after he sent his first unsolicited manuscript to Scarborough theatre's artistic director, Alan Ayckbourn.

Those impressed by the 33-year-old Betts's ear for dialogue and eye for social realism in A Listening Heaven will have been clock-watching, waiting for his return to the East Coast next week.

Judging by the reviews for Clockwatching's initial run at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, they will not be disappointed by his "sad play", as Betts self-mockingly calls his dark tale of familial loyalty and disloyalty in which a dysfunctional northern family grapples with the trials and temptations of life amid domestic disorder.

Torben - named after the Danish hippie tennis player of the 1960s, Torben Ulrich - was commissioned to write Clockwatching after A Listening Heaven impressed Ayckbourn. "He thought the play was bit dark, and the direction too, but he didn't offer any advice for the future. He just said 'Give us another one'!"

Betts duly delivered Clockwatching, and again it is a darkly humorous drama, highly articulate in expressing an inability to communicate. "But when I start to write a play, I don't think, 'Oh, I'll write about these particular things'. I start with the characters, and the main starting point in Clockwatching is this old chap who hasn't been a good father and his mistreated his wife, treating her as his slave and his cook," says Torben.

"When she falls ill, over a year we see how his life descends into a child-like condition, because he can't cope. We see the pain of his life unravel, and how his family copes with him when they don't actually want to be around him but are tied by blood. There's that conflict between duty and desire."

Traditional family gatherings - high days and holidays - form the setting for this domestic drama. "Because I've used festive occasions such as birthday and Christmas, as Alan Ayckbourn does, rather irritatingly I've been compared to him, but those are the occasions when the outside world doesn't exist or impinge upon them, the time when they're in this windowless, hermetic world of their own."

Torben Betts, a London-based writer with Lincolnshire roots, is not as bleak as his social realist plays. "But in my writing I am drawn to the darker places. My philosophy of theatre is that the dark side is more interesting," he says. "If I go to the theatre and someone is trying to make me laugh, I find that depressing.

"I'm more drawn to things that are sad, but I don't consider that depressing. It's melancholy. Depressing is watching someone like Little and Large!

"That's why I write tragedies, although they're described as black comedies, but I see them as tragedies with a bit of anxious comedy in there."

Clockwatching, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in repertoire from May 10 to July 11. Box office: 01723 370541.