When actress Rebecca Peyton met writer/director Martin Bartelt on a course at the Actors Centre in London, the two hit it off so well that Martin broached the subject of them working together.

“I said ‘I am only interested in making a show about my sister’s murder’,” recalls Rebecca. “He said ‘ok’.”

That was in 2007. The show, Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, comes to the Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton, tomorrow (Friday).

It is a combination of memoir and observational comedy about what happened to the Peyton family after the death of Rebecca’s sister, Kate, in 2005.

The news flashed round the media world because Kate was a BBC journalist, a producer, who was shot shortly after arriving in Mogadishu, Somalia, to report on the peace process.

Rebecca, who was then in her early 30s, said that as events unfolded her gut instinct was that she wanted her voice to be heard.

She said: “I felt I had something interesting and important to say, about press freedom and the pressures people are put under at work to the strange process of grief to the situation in Somalia.”