'I'm Not Being Funny' review — comedy is therapy in this intimate and heartfelt show

Read our review of Piers Black's play I'm Not Being Funny, now in performances at the Bush Theatre to 6 June.

Summary

• Piers Black's I'm Not Being Funny plays at the Bush Theatre
• The story centres on a couple using stand-up to deal with their feelings
• Jerome Yates and Tia Bannon are excellent as the central couple
• Bryony Shanahan's production is effectively intimate

“It’s not funny; nothing’s funny” – or so we’re told near the start of I’m Not Being Funny, the Piers Black 90-minute (no interval) two-hander that delivers on the assertion of its title.

At the start, you might well assume the opposite. A sweet-faced electrician called Peter (Jerome Yates) is seen trying out gags from the comfort of the family living room, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to rope in the audience. Sure, he references “greyness everywhere you go”, but aren’t such sentiments the commonplace inverse of clowning?

Before long, though, you sense anger and sadness coursing beneath quips about a spider that – wait for it – “has legs”. Peter’s wife Billie (a radiant Tia Bannon) soon appears and starts in on a comic routine of her own by way of preparation for an open mic night to come. But it’s not long before we clock humour as a defence against the unexpected curveballs thrown by life: comedy-as-therapy until such time as fate goes in for the kill.

To say much more would spoil the sense of discovery on which Black’s play depends, and which is powerfully served up by its fully committed actors and the always-empathic direction of Bryony Shanahan.

Suffice it to report that the extraordinary intimacy achieved in performance put me in mind of Luke Norris’s Guess How Much I Love You, seen at the start of this year. As with that Royal Court premiere, this, too, addresses the often unspoken pressures of parenthood, the given landscape here containing a crucial third character in the couple’s unseen three-year-old daughter, Ruby, who very much comes to define the play. Shifts in lighting cue short, sharp scenes that sketch in the couple’s background, and we’re given glimpses elsewhere of a future not everyone will get to see.

Black doesn’t shy away from the often terrifying speed with which passion can turn to pain and back again, but his own comic instincts are assured enough to keep the material as buoyant as the swerves of fate allow it to be. (A story involving an NHS hospital lift is an instant classic.)

At times, the writing gets a bit symbol-laden for its own good – talk, for instance, of “the pendulum” of life feels rather on the nose for the dryly observant, quick-witted pair we see before us. And the increasingly splintered structure can’t forestall a sense that we never discover all that much about the couple, whether in bantering mode or not.

That said, the ready domesticity of Amelia Jane Hankin’s set contributes to our sense of a home soon to be ruptured, and the production manages to have fun at the expense of “My Heart Will Go On” while also using the Celine Dion power ballad all over again for emotive effect.

The play has much to say, too, about the ethics of drawing upon life experience for public consumption – something artists have been doing well before comedy put the quotidian centre stage. In the end, I was as moved by the shared passion of the actors as I was by a script that wears its grief writ large. The play may not in the end be funny, but it certainly does grab at the heart.

I'm Not Being Funny is at the Bush Theatre to 6 June. Book I'm Not Being Funny tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: I'm Not Being Funny (Photos by Richard Lakos)