Review: Murder at Midnight by Nina Jervis-Green

October 14, 2025

Thanks to Nina Jervis-Green from www.ninathewriter.com for this review.

Murder at Midnight is the companion piece to an earlier Torben Betts play, Murder in the Dark. But don’t worry if, like me, you didn’t see that one. Murder at Midnight works as a standalone murder mystery, though that isn’t all it is. It’s a thriller and a farce that put Matt, my companion for the evening, in the mind of the classic Inside No. 9 episode A Quiet Night In… “only without the quiet!”.

We open at midnight on New Year’s Eve, in a lounge with blood on the curtains. There have been murders, and the police are on the scene. According to one officer, “if you wrote this as a play, no-one would believe it!”. Cue swirling mists of time, or rather Robbie Williams’ monster hit Let Me Entertain You played backwards, taking us back to the evening’s events.

The lounge is in a fancy mansion that belongs to Jonny the Cyclops (Jason Durr of Heartbeat fame), a notorious drugs baron and Robbie Williams fan. He’s just returned home and is about to propose to his girlfriend, Lisa (Katie McGlynn of Coronation Street fame). Lisa’s just come home from a New Year’s Eve party with an undercover policeman called Paul (Max Bowden of EastEnders fame), who’s dressed as a priest. He’s pretending to seduce Lisa, but he’s really trying to find out if Jonny murdered his first wife.

These aren’t the only characters, and those aren’t the only storylines. We’ve also got Trainwreck, Jonny’s lumbering, love-starved sidekick, to contend with. Not to mention Jonny’s dotty mum, Shirley (the formidable Susie Blake), who’s wielding tarot cards, convinced that the devil walks among them. Then there’s Shirley’s frazzled Romanian carer, Cristina… oh, and a nervous burglar called Russell, who bursts in wearing a clown’s mask.

You might have gleaned that there’s a lot going on here. So much so, there’s a clever triple-level set to show different happenings in different rooms of the mansion, often simultaneously. While this got a bit distracting at times, it also kept the story moving along at pace. Along with the comedy come healthy doses of violence, blood, and offensive language – the play’s director Philip Franks describes it as “Feydeau rewritten by Tarantino” – some of which evoked gasps from the audience. (Note: there’s a full list of content warnings on the play’s website).

There are some fantastic performances, particularly from Susie Blake, Jason Durr, and Katie McGlynn, who dominate the stage throughout. However, some of the characters felt under-written, in a way that made it hard for me to truly engage with them. Russell the burglar (Callum Balmforth) had an intriguing backstory that was only hinted at, and it was hard to believe an undercover policeman could be as staggeringly inept as Paul. Meanwhile, Iryna Poplavska played Cristina in an earnest and likable way that made me wish she had a little more stage time.

The ending was a surprise, though by that point so much had gone on that I almost didn’t care who’d committed the murders; I was just grateful for the chance to breathe. Yet even though some aspects missed the mark, Murder at Midnight is a captivating and highly entertaining way to spend an evening – if you can keep up!