Writer: Luke Norris
Director: Jeremy Herrin
Breathtakingly tender, Luke Norris’s new play, examining the reaction of two parents to the news that their yet-to-be-born child will have spina bifida, will reduce most of the audience to tears. The two main actors, Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy, bring their characters thrillingly and heartbreakingly alive to such an extent that watching Guess How Much I Love You? feels like an invasion of privacy.
The first line of the play directed by Jeremy Herrin hints at the dilemmas to come. “Alive or dead?” demands Sheehy’s character, entitled Her in the script. Sitting up on a hospital bed next to an ultrasound machine with her belly, coated in gel, exposed, it seems as if she is asking about the baby. The nurse has unexpectedly left the room, perhaps to seek advice or a more senior practitioner. But quickly we realise that she, along with her husband, is playing 20 Questions to while away the time in the nurse’s absence.
The expectant mother is too worried to fully concentrate on the game, and so instead, after an argument about pornography, the couple go through a list of baby names they have shortlisted. Coming from an Irish family, he suggests Oisin, but she remarks that it sounds too much like Mr Sheen. “Aoife?” he suggests. Too difficult to spell, she replies. She’s Welsh, and so they toy with the name Aneurin, or Nye for short. “New Year’s Eve,” he retorts, but later they agree that the name conjures up the phrase “The end is nigh”. It’s uncomfortably prophetic.
To prevent the drama from coming across like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Norris makes sure that there is intrigue in every scene where vital information is withheld, agonisingly so in the third scene. Other writers may be minded to present quick scenes as the year goes by, but Norris cleverly lingers on each one to probe more deeply the couple’s anguished choices.
Sheehy is utterly, tenderly, believable as she navigates hope, grief, and guilt. Her screams of rage from the hospital bed are raw and chilling. Meanwhile, Aramayo’s Him is more stoic in the face of such impossibilities, but you know that he is crumbling inside, too. His pragmatism is measured by his love for his wife. He will do the right thing, whatever the right thing is in such a winless situation. The couple’s slow dance in the hospital room is a terrible beauty; an unspoken line by Yeats, Aramayo’s character’s favourite poet.
Grace Smart’s unfussy design, sets on a carousel, presents hospital rooms and parts of the couple’s London house, allowing the actors to shine and giving space for the sorrow of their characters to almost solidify around them. Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting design is just as understated as the sets.
On paper, Norris’s script ends ambiguously, but after all that has happened to the couple, it’s easy to understand why Herrin offers us a more solid conclusion.
Runs until 21 February 2026
