23 – 27 June
Billie has signed up both herself and her husband Peter for a stand-up night, and now the pair are stuck in their living room trying to come up with a tight five. It is a strong set-up, and Bryony Shanahan’s production gets a lot out of it, pitching the bright, brittle glare of stand-up against a cosy domestic scene full of the detritus and low-level madness of life with a small child.
That contrast gives the play much of its charge. There is the pleasure of making one another laugh set against the tiny abrasions of coupledom. There are deliberately bad jokes, lazy jokes, sharp jokes, jokes that curdle as soon as they land. There are also the couple’s very different instincts as performers. Peter works hard, overthinking structure and material; Billie wings it, quicker, bolder and more alive to the buzz of performance. Their arguments about comedy turn out to be arguments about exposure, taste, intimacy and control.
Piers Black’s writing is especially good on the messy architecture of a long relationship. The play catches the private language of a couple, the callbacks and bits that become their own form of shorthand, but also the way old injuries can reappear in comic form and still draw blood. It is very funny, but the humour is never doing only one thing.
Tia Bannon and Jerome Yates are excellent together. Bannon is especially compelling, all nervous energy, appetite and edge, and she is very funny. Yates gives Peter a quieter, slightly sadder counterweight. Together they feel properly lived in: sexy, tired, occasionally cruel, still trying.
The production is full of smart touches. The baby monitor is used brilliantly, both as comic detail and as a reminder of the child just offstage. The flashbacks and interstitial scenes are among the strongest material here, vivid little slides into courtship, bad snogging, first dances, and parental strain. There is also some genuinely terrific physical comedy threaded through the evening.
Then the darker material begins to gather. Billie’s hospital visits, half-glimpsed at first, slowly take shape. The reveal of her cancer is handled with real care, and the play is particularly good on the awkwardness that follows terrible news: the bargaining, the anger, the bad jokes, the effort to make something unbearable sound manageable for just long enough to get through it.
What I’m Not Being Funny gets right is that it never drops the comedy once life turns dark. Instead it lets humour and pain sit beside each other, which feels much truer. By the end, the play reaches something genuinely moving. The final stretch, with its wishes for the future Billie fears she will not see, is painful and beautiful without tipping into sentimentality. Stand-up becomes more than a device. It becomes a way of thinking about performance, deflection and survival, about what can be shared and what cannot. What remains is the force of this couple’s love in all its mess: funny, frightened, exasperated, tender and real.
★★★★☆ Tilly Marshall, 24 June 2026
Photography credit: Rich Lakos
