Theatre review: I'm Not Being Funny

Piers Black's accurately-titled I'm Not Being Funny begins with an interesting high concept: A mix of bleak drama and stand-up comedy, it follows young married couple Peter (Jerome Yates) and Billie (Transphobia Ltd Employee Tia Bannon) as they practice comedy routines in their living room, preparing for an open-mic night Billie has signed them up for. She thinks it could be a good form of couple's therapy for them, and at first it seems she might be trying to help Peter deal with his anxiety over never being able to make their three-year-old daughter laugh. As their attempts to build a "tight five" minutes each go on though we discover that the trauma they're dealing with is a lot more serious: Billie has a terminal disease and four to six years left to live, and the open mic is her way of dealing both with her own feelings, and how the news has impacted the relationship with her family.

So the play begins with Peter flailing as he rehearses a routine consisting entirely of ancient dad jokes; Billie fares a little bit better with a more personal, confessional routine, thinking she can do her own Nanette in five minutes.

The real audience serves as the imagined one the pair are aiming their rehearsal at, and Bryony Shanahan's production handles the jumps between performance and domestic conversation smoothly. The idea that they're going to play around with anecdotes from their past for material is a good template to introduce flashbacks to how they met - at school, aged 12, becoming each other's first girlfriend and boyfriend before splitting up and getting back together years later - as well as the diagnosis that's put a shadow over their lives.

But as we get to the more serious heart of the story the interesting format falters. The initial stand-up conceit fades away, and we spend a lot of time with them trying to come up with gags by ad-libbing a kind of double act; a premise that doesn't make sense if the idea is to end up with two separate routines that'll be ready by the next night.

Even so the structural issues weren't enough to explain why I was really struggling to connect with the play, until I realised it falls into a trap common to stories about terminal illness: Black has given us a lot of insight into the physical and mental pain and how it's made Billie lash out at her husband, but he's not given us enough moments to like her: With all the focus on making us care about her impending death, he hasn't made us care about her life.

It means the constant arguments make the evening increasingly claustrophobic and shrill, and the moment the audience thinks we might get a little respite another screaming match starts. For me the last straw was the revelation that the reason Peter's act is so bad is that, having agreed to do an embarrassing public performance he didn't want to for his wife's sake, she then vetoed every subject he tried to joke about. The performances are good and the production slick, but by the end the tone has steered so far from the initial balance between comedy and drama that it's hard to empathise.

I'm Not Being Funny by Piers Black is booking until the 13th of June at the Bush Theatre's Studio.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Richard Lakos.