Review: Guess How Much I Love You? (Royal Court)

Review by Lily Melhuish

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Some stories make you laugh because they’re funny; others make you laugh because the alternative is falling apart. Written by Luke Norris, Guess How Much I Love You?  sits right in the fleshy middle. Set in an ultrasound room, an expectant couple, known only as Him (Robert Aramayo) and Her (Rosie Sheehy), play a game of twenty questions to pass the increasingly worrisome amount of time that the sonographer has been absent. Something’s wrong, or maybe, he jokes, she’s “fallen in” the toilet. That blend of humour and fear becomes the play’s emotional baseline, slicing through the tension just when you need it most.

What follows is a sharp, fast, and incredibly natural piece of writing from Norris, the sort of dialogue that feels overheard rather than written. Their conversations jump tracks constantly — finishing each other’s thoughts, starting new ones mid‑sentence, abandoning ideas as quickly as they surface. It’s exactly how long-term couples talk, especially when they’re anxious. Jeremy Herrin, whose track record includes People, Places and Things, directs this with a steady, confident hand. He understands how to let the ugly truth sit in a room without alienating the audience; he keeps the language clean and the silences earned. Grace Smart’s design supports the velocity with swift, blackout transitions that function like merciful blinks. In those seconds of darkness, I found myself grateful for the pause. A brief moment to wipe my eyes, to breathe, and to brace for whatever came next.

The hard thing arrives, and the play refuses to sensationalise it. The scan presents devastating news; the baby has a 50/50 chance of survival, and the couple must decide whether to continue or to terminate the pregnancy. An argument unfolds in their bedroom that is painfully intimate and rigorously fair; it never reads as a public debate staged for an audience’s moral adjudication. Norris writes about two people on one side of the table, trying to carry each other through incompatible needs. She is overwhelmed by guilt, by the physical reality of what she’s carrying. He reaches, almost instinctively, for any scrap of optimism. They clash, not because they’re on different sides, but because there is no right side.

Sheehy and Aramayo are a superb pairing, alert to each other’s timing and temperature. They can snap a laugh cleanly into a sob and back again without sentimentality. Sheehy in particular has this laser‑focused connection; she barely takes her eyes off him, as if he’s the only safe place to look. Aramayo balances her intensity with a kind of warm, hopeful steadiness that never feels naïve. Their chemistry sells the idea that this couple has years of shared language and private jokes behind them, even though we’re rarely given specific details about their lives or personalities outside of this difficult situation.

The play is mostly a two‑hander, with the exception of Lena Kaur’s Midwife, who brings this painfully recognisable, gently upbeat British bedside manner. Her scenes are short but incredibly effective, ushering us into one of the play’s most harrowing scenes.  We know where we’re headed, but foreknowledge does not cushion the impact. Norris keeps reminding us that the world is still turning outside this tiny hospital room. 

Guess How Much I Love You? takes its title from the children’s book of the same name, which originated the expression “I love you to the moon and back.” In a similar pattern, Norris keeps measuring love against larger and larger contexts, against science, money, and mortality. The couple’s private catastrophe ripples outward to the systemic in a brilliant moment where Sheehy says, almost flippantly, “We’re the lucky ones… imagine this, but it bankrupts you as well.” It’s a jolt, a reminder that grief doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The play is full of these small but vital touches that widen the lens just enough.

Norris’s choice to keep the characters nameless, just “Him” and “Her”, feels more pertinent as the play goes on. It gives the audience room to project their own fears, hopes, and experiences. They’re detailed enough to feel real, aided by no short of phenomenal performances, but open enough to feel universal. We don’t learn their jobs or hobbies, but we learn who they are to each other, what they believe in, how they love and how they grieve. It’s a smart structure: the characters become a frame we can step into, rather than a set of strangers we’re watching from the outside.

If I had to point to a weaker spot, the final scene drifts slightly into fairytale territory compared to the rawness that precedes it, but I’m trying to poke holes in solid steel. The emotional groundwork is so strong that the ending feels more like a stylistic choice than a flaw, and despite its honesty, this is still theatre, and a bit of hope goes a long way. 

Ultimately, Guess How Much I Love You? is a production that demands conversation. It refuses the lazy comforts of conflict-as-drama and instead models what living looks like when life withdraws the easy options. It’s a test of empathy that rejects the smug safety of “that would never happen to me.” And it leaves you with difficult, necessary homework: to talk, to listen, to trust that the person you love can hold the worst thing you have to say without turning away.

Guess How Much I Love You? Plays at Royal Court until 21st February. Tickets from https://royalcourttheatre.com/events/guess-how-much-i-love-you/

Photos by Johan Persson