Review: I’m Not Being Funny, Bush Theatre ★★★★

I’m Not Being Funny: A living room, a deadline, and a conversation long overdue

They say laughter is the best medicine, and that may be true, but it is not medicine you can readily order yourself to take. This tension sits at the very heart of I’m Not Being Funny, Piers Black‘s new play currently running in the Studio at the Bush Theatre, and it is one that the production explores with considerable skill and genuine heart.

The premise is deceptively domestic. Billie (Tia Bannon) has signed herself and her husband Peter (Jerome Yates) up for a stand-up comedy night. Tonight, locked in their living room with only a baby monitor for company, they must each write a “tight five.” The detritus of a young family surrounds them: soft toys, plastic pastel water bottles, those tiny chairs you never quite know what to do with. It is a space immediately and painfully recognisable to anyone who has lived it. What unfolds over ninety minutes is far more than a comedy writing session. It is a reckoning, a love story, a grief that has not yet been spoken aloud, and ultimately a quietly devastating act of hope.

The Bush Theatre has long been one of London’s most important incubators of new writing, and I’m Not Being Funny feels very much in that tradition. That the production has already been extended speaks not just to audience enthusiasm but to the strength of the material.

At first, Billie’s unyielding desire to prepare tight five comedy routines appears to verge on bullying, and Peter going along with it looks like weakness. But as our understanding develops, the rationale for both of them becomes clearer. Tia Bannon is exceptional, bringing a quality of sustained, layered intensity to a character who uses humour as both armour and weapon.

As the evening progresses and her increasingly rigid rules about what material is permissible come into sharper focus, we begin to understand that each forbidden subject represents a place of unbearable pain. We learn that these are precious memories or stolen milestones she cannot bear to approach directly.

Jerome Yates is her equal as Peter: warm, funny, anxious to support, and quietly wrestling with his own unwillingness to look at what lies ahead. Together they have real chemistry. They feel like people who have weathered things together and who, in this living room tonight, must weather one thing more.

Director Bryony Shanahan, former Joint Artistic Director of the Royal Exchange in Manchester, brings an assured hand to the material. The skilfully layered flashbacks build our understanding of a family in pain, and the two actors’ ability to slip between time periods with barely a breath is a triumph of both direction and performance. These sequences are dizzying at times, though it becomes clear as the story unfolds that this is an intentional mirroring of how unbalanced and frenzied the act of looking back becomes when the future is uncertain.

The peppering through of dad jokes keeps this from being too deep, too soon, and the joke sequences are sharp enough that the audience’s laughter is genuine, sometimes from the strength of the material and sometimes from the shock of its juxtaposition with what surrounds it. The smallest lines drop clues like breadcrumbs: “a happy scan and a scary scan,”; “everyone’s old.”; “decisions about a whole other human being”. Asaf Zohar‘s sound design runs delicately below the action, giving hints to scenes such as the hospital without ever overplaying its hand. Amelia Jane Hankin‘s set and Lucía Sánchez Roldán‘s lighting complete a quietly accomplished creative team.

Perhaps the pressure cooker of the deadline is what they needed to finally have the conversation they had been circling. The moment of catharsis, when they find a way to talk about their fears and even laugh and dream together, is genuinely moving. The Celine Dion, space-lit ending could have tipped over into sentimentality. Here it earns itself entirely. Because we believe in this living room, we believe in this scene. And the reminder at the close that a child’s laughter is the very best of the best medicine lands with exactly the weight it deserves.

The pacing is not quite perfect, and some sections circle the same emotional territory a little too many times. These are minor criticisms of an evening that is otherwise confidently constructed.

I’m Not Being Funny is a play about what we are willing to say to the people we love when time feels short, and about the extraordinary and sometimes strange ways we find to say it. Poignant, funny, and fiercely human: this is a play that reminds us why theatre matters. It holds up a light to the lives we are all quietly, bravely living.

In an achingly familiar living room, we discover that laughter really might be the best medicine, if only we could help ourselves to take it.

I’m Not Being Funny runs at the Bush Theatre Studio, Shepherd’s Bush, until 13 June 2026. Tickets from £15. bushtheatre.co.uk

Content guidance: This show contains discussion of cancer diagnosis, grief, loss, mention of suicide, depictions of anxiety and a panic attack, mild aggressive behaviour and acute distress, alcohol consumption and strong language throughout. A detailed self-care guide is available from the Bush Theatre.

All photos: Richard Lakos

[Thank you to the Bush Theatre for a gifted ticket for an honest review.]

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