Review by Simon Jenner, May 20 2026
★ ★ ★ ★(★)
“I think it’s got legs.” Peter’s spider jokes delivered in his living room are so bad Billie, his wife takes over from his string of dad-jokes. The audience is quietly relieved. She’s far funnier, far edgier, her storytelling jokes land. But there’s boundaries she won’t cross and Peter finds the tripwires everywhere. Who are these wannabe stand-ups kidding? But Billie’s signed them up and they’re not leaving their living-room till they’ve got a ‘tight-five’. Though Peter’s not wrong when he suggests he’s more “a loose two”. Sometimes though the living-room leaves them and we’re shot through with the past and future. Piers Black’s I’m Not Being Funny premieres at the Bush Theatre directed by Traverse Theatre Associate Artist Bryony Shanahan till June 13.
Jerome Yates. Photo Credit: Richard Lakos.
Billie (Tia Bannon, who made such an impression in Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner) sparks and flies off the more cautious Peter (Jerome Yates, Netflix’s Project Codename). Yates intimates someone who’s found his lodestar in Billie, yet she’s shifting. Down from the north, marooned at school with his accent, it’s Billie who befriends Peter and they’re childhood sweethearts with a space in between. It bonds them like few others. But whereas Peter’s grateful for this, Billie’s always looking at other selves she could have been. The one who went to uni, the one who travelled. The one who maybe didn’t have their daughter Ruby offstage gurgling as a third character in their baby monitor.
Amelia Jane Hankin’s set of a living room centred on a sofa strewn with toys and bric-a-brac speaks – and anchors – the intimacy Bannon and Yates convey in tier breathtaking way with the script and each other, through Tommy Ross Williams’ intimacy direction. The mic each picks up is both a defence and a sudden naked volume, as Billie says, the voice she’d love to be. Clearly the actors have immersed themselves and Bannon is one of several who’ve worked on the play’s development. Slow-burn for quite a length of its 90 minutes, it’s also a slow reveal of what it is that drives I’m Not being Funny, which clues in the stand-up caveat as the work unspools several ways.
This is where, superbly lit by Lucia Sanchez Roldan, the language of the past shafts through in a cold whiteish-blue-green narrow strip encasing the actors as they’re catapulted into it. Reveals and motifs strike through, and some painfully funny scenes, where Billie is doing the consoling to a work colleague. And another when Billie’s call is put through to an elevator is already famous.
Much of this addresses the standard clown/tears trop of any drama around stand-up, where they’re pulling in different directions. “I’m not gonna stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and the stories about you and me” Peter declares. But that’s exactly what Billie’s good at. First meeting at school where Billie has somehow rescued Peter; first kiss, first room together. Till those boundaries kick in. But the different directions are also past and present twice over, and how this informs everything they’re doing or can look forward to. Those other scenes reveal the past they can’t dwell on, the wrong side of sympathy or laughter. But of course some of it is. All this is handled seamlessly, and the climactic build-up, after some occlusive rapid-fire reveals is extraordinary: past and present alternate in quick-fire like a series of five-second jokes. This is where Sanchez Roldan’s lighting rises to award-level.
Tia Bannon and Jerome Yates. Photo Credit: Richard Lakos.
Asaf Zohar’s sound sometimes riffs too on the Nineties, when both were scarcely born, yet this is where early on Bannon fourth-walls the audience on their feelings about the Nineties, a sure-fire hit. And the reasons for the Nineties being better than the Twenties gradually unspools more than the Angel of History who might have told you anyway. Time and its limitations are calling and the couple look backward to look forward at all.
Any more would be to reveal too much. There’s a few longeurs in the middle; the reveals are sometimes blink and miss. The way the premiss builds isn’t wholly credible, but the characters are spot-on and their development devastating. Peter the electrician needing rules and realising his circuits won’t last the thousand-year castle that strikes him with wonder. Billie the more fluid, inspired, instinctively read-the-room funny who seizes life but has steeper rules that Peter might lurch into like electric cattle-prods. But only because Billie’s nudged him to that territory.
Two outstanding actors, lighting, set and sensitive, moment-by-moment swerves in Shanahan’s acute direction make this something that, with a few knots resolved, might be a mini-classic. A must-see.
Prentice Productions
Casting Consultant Fran Cattaneo, Associate Producer Alice Linnane
Production Manager Harry Fearnley-Brown for New World Productions, Stage Manager Roni Neale. Stage Management Placement Liza Evans, Photo Credit: Richard Lakos.
Jerome Yates and Tia Bannon. Photo Credit: Richard Lakos.