Review: Guess How Much I Love You?
in Jerwood Theatre Downstairs @ the Royal Court until February 21st 2026
Director: Jeremy Herrin
Writer: Luke Norris
Cast: Robert Aramayo, Rosie Sheehy & Lena Kaur
One of the hardest things about grief is how unexceptional it is. It eviscerates you; it rips you asunder and leaves you to pick at the husk; you are but a speck of dust beneath its glare. But neither it nor you are special. Nothing you think or feel or experience is original. It renders you trite and mundane as you try to navigate a path back to some semblance of what life was like before all of the despair and rage but you are stuck in its aftermath, left to wander in some awful wilderness, desperately trying to keep your composure, to mask your pain, to feel another emotion - to feel any other emotion. Well, so what? You and everyone else, buddy. Why don’t you just grow the fuck up?
It’s this idea of grief as simultaneously all-consuming and entirely pedestrian, perhaps even immature, that Luke Norris’ Guess How Much I Love You? manages to capture with such meticulous insight and empathy. Starring Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy, the play follows the lives of a couple forced to make, and then live with the consequences of, an impossible choice when a 20-week scan reveals that their unborn son has “profound” open spina bifida. Together, we watch as the couple grieves for the live they once had, the future they imagined, the healthy child they wanted, and their own relationship. As she brands herself and her own body - her own flesh and skin - a failure, he wrestles with the wretched truth that his grief is, and always will be, secondary to hers until their resentment erupts and threatens to eradicate them both.
Norris’ dialogue is sometimes poetic and often barbed, and the two protagonists use it to slice each other wide open. Their grief festers and rots, their wounds raw with a callousness that they turn on each other. They profess to despise each other, to wish each other dead, yet through it all we never once doubt their love for one another. There are no clichés here. Their words are poisonous and bitter, and on more than one occasion do they express thoughts and feelings that are all but unforgiveable, but the love between them is always authentic. No matter how vicious or hateful they are, we believe, wholly and fully, in them and what they are experiencing. In an instant, they switch from love to loathing and back again, and not once is it ever not crushingly, desperately honest.
The dramatic structure of the text - five scenes and a short epilogue - intensifies its power. Each scene unfolds with a slow, careful precision. Characters and moments are given space to breathe, so that the audience can invest in these people and attempt to fathom, if just for a moment, the scale of their pain. As each scene progresses, its grip tightens and a wave of panic and claustrophobia descends and we want to be anywhere else. All five scenes then end with a blackout as the stage is quickly rearranged, and we are left to sit with what we have just seen. Indeed, much like the characters we are forced to process it: there is no other option.
Guess How Much I Love You? caps a remarkable twelve months for Aramayo. From starring in Annemarie Jacir’s timely dramatisation of the Great Palestinian Revolt, Palestine 36, to playing the lead in I Swear, Kirk Jones’ highly-acclaimed British drama about the life of Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson, he starts 2026 as the recipient of not one but two BAFTA nominations and as the winner of Breakthrough Performer of the Year at the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards. His performance here is just further evidence of his incredible talent. He is gangly and awkward and riven with anger and anguish, and he imbues the play with the most extraordinary potency.
Rosie Sheehy, who received a much-deserved nomination for Best Actress at last year’s Olivier Awards for her performance in the wickedly odd Machinal at the Old Vic, and was also the highlight of the recent revival of Conor McPherson’s The Brightening Air, also at the Old Vic, is likewise sensational here. She plays her character with such a broken physicality, as though if she were to release her grip on the world for just a second she would be catapulted into some infinite abyss, and is a powerhouse of inconsolable fury. Alongside Aramayo, she embodies all of the cruelty of grief and how it consumes and corrupts you, while adeptly capturing how it also leaves you listless and empty, as though your insides have been stolen.
Helming the play is Jeremy Herrin, whose recent directorial hits include The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which I thoroughly enjoyed, Duncan Macmillan’s remarkable People, Places and Things, and Tony Kushner’s English language adaptation of The Visit, or The Old Lady Comes to Call, which had its 2020 run at the National Theatre cut short by the end of the world. His direction here is taut and unobtrusive, with the characters and the dialogue are left to do much of the work because it is through them that all of the truth of the drama spills out. That Herrin is also able to find humour and warmth in a story so gutwrenching is a testament to his directorial prowess.
Those of you who have followed this blog since its nascency (seven of you, I believe) may recall that four Royal Court productions featured in my countdown of the 20 best plays of 2025. If Guess How Much I Love You? is anything to go by, this little theatre, which is celebrating its 70th birthday this year, and its run of radical and exciting shows are in no danger of stalling anytime soon. This is a powerful and pensive work that boasts exquisite performances and is deftly written, and I would be stunned if this didn’t transfer to the West End in the near future.
Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐