'Guess How Much I Love You?' review — this gutturally affecting play expresses grief at its most elemental

Read our review of Guess How Much I Love You?, starring Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, now in performances at the Royal Court to 21 February.

Summary

• Luke Norris's new play Guess How Much I Love You? premieres at the Royal Court
• The drama centres on a couple expecting a baby faced with an agonising choice
• Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo are extraordinary expressing grief and despair

Luke Norris’s searing and heart-wrenching new play about a Sophie's choice conundrum begins with a game of 20 questions. In an ultrasound room, a couple sits waiting for their doctor to return with news of their 20-week scan. “Alive or Dead?” she asks her husband. As the script hurtles forward, through the terrain of devastating findings and incomprehensible decisions, it’s a question that takes on a far starker meaning.

The couple, played with astonishing natural instinct by Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, are confronted with their greatest fear. “The most profound example she had ever seen,” the woman rages, pacing the bedroom, trying to make sense of the words. Now they stand at a crossroads: proceed with the pregnancy and risk bringing a baby with severe disabilities into the world, with only a 50-50 chance of survival, or choose an ending no parent ever wants to contemplate.

Together, they circle their options, fracture, and test the limits of their love. From the one central, damning dilemma, Norris’ script opens out into an examination of human feeling at its most raw: passion, guilt, impossible inner battles, and grief without reprieve. Directed by Jeremy Herrin, the production tips from absolute realism into something approaching horror. Between scenes set in hospital rooms, bathrooms and waiting areas, the theatre is plunged into pitch-black uncertainty. With the couple’s single decision, the rest of their lives are cast into that same tragic unknown.

Designed by Grace Smart, everything carries a claustrophobic edge. The usually vast main-house stage at the Royal Court is shrunk into a tight semicircle; at times, there barely seems room to breathe. And yet, within the darkness, flashes of normality and wit shine through. They compile lists of baby names, debate which takeaway to eat after childbirth, and play their first dance song through tinny phone speakers. While death sits at the centre of Norris’s script, this is also a study in day-to-day survival.

Still, Norris has found a language to express grief at its most elemental. “The sun doesn’t make any sense,” Sheehy's character says, lying in a hospital bed. Every line in this expertly constructed script carries real, weighted purpose. But the play is just as eloquent in its silences. As a nurse does an examination, we wait with them, suspended in a moment stretched almost beyond endurance.

Continuing her reign as one of the country’s finest stage actors, Sheehy is nothing short of extraordinary. Flitting from sharp sarcasm to raw, animalistic despair, she behaves like a body reacting before her mind has time to catch up. “Grow up, grow up, grow up,” she roars at her husband, tipping petrol over what remains of their shared life. Even as that life continues, the pain of the future they imagined – the three of them together – never wanes. Gutturally affecting, this is theatre that paints a vivid picture of the delicacy of being alive.

Guess How Much I Love You? is at the Royal Court to 21 February. Book Guess How Much I Love You? tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Guess How Much I Love You? (Photos by Johan Persson)