Review: GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?, Royal Court
Photo credit: Johan Persson
A bold opening to the Royal Court’s 2026 season, the world premiere of Luke Norris’ Guess How Much I Love You? is a fraught 90 minutes of grief, guilt and painful love. After a shattering 20-week scan, expectant couple Her (Rosie Sheehy) and Him (Robert Aramayo) are thrown into a spiral of devastating choices and harrowing repercussions that force them to renegotiate their relationship with themselves, each other, and the world around them.
Norris’ writing occasionally struggles to find its feet, binding itself in exposition and feeling rather too declarative and academicised for a couple sharing the most emotionally raw and intimate moments of their lives. A pointless and overly articulated debate about the ethics of porn early in the first scene of the show is a prime example of this.
Under the hand of acclaimed director Jeremy Herrin, the cast are pinned in increasingly small spaces throughout the play, forced together to confront their grief. As a performer himself, Norris has written some meaty roles for his actors - there is wailing, gnashing, writhing and yelling. Sheehy’s performance, in particular, is intensely physical and shockingly guttural. It’s an uncomfortable but undoubtedly powerful display.
The script is spurred along by moments of violent and profound misunderstanding between the couple, or a lack of will to understand, which must be realistic if itchingly frustrating. There are also infrequent passages that verge on patronising lecturing from Him, most notably when he quite unbelievably fires back at his wife’s suicidal ideation with a quote from Hamlet. It feels like the play is trying very hard to hold Him up as the noble hero of this piece, even down to the poster design where Aramayo’s side profile pushes Sheehy into the very corner of the frame.
The insistent invoking of Hamlet is a little on the nose in this play, and somewhat muddies the intentions of the piece; Guess How Much I Love You? feels like it wants to be a play about fatherhood, but the indisputable supremacy of maternity in the physical and emotional hierarchy of grief gets in the way.
Guess How Much I Love You? is a harrowing piece that digs unflinchingly into the ugliness of grief and guilt. Real, raw and shockingly honest, Luke Norris has captured some frightening glimmers of truth.
*** Three stars
Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett
