Guess How Much I Love You? at the Royal Court – review

When artistic director David Byrne was planning the Royal Court’s 70^th anniversary season, he wanted to open with a new play – what the theatre is known for – and he wanted to make a splash.

You can see why Guess How Much I Love You? by actor Luke Norris – best known for TV’s Poldark – grabbed his attention. Its opening scene feels utterly contemporary and entirely real, crackling with the cut and thrust of everyday conversation.

A young married couple are in a hospital side room in the middle of their 20-week scan. She (described in the programme as Her) is hooked up to an ultrasound machine, her pregnant tummy exposed and covered in gel as she waits for the nurse to return. He (Him) prowls around the constricted space, trying to distract her with games (20 Questions) and the names they might choose for the bump. He plays her the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” and asks her to dance with him.

Their quickfire exchanges are funny and convincing. You instantly believe in them as a couple and care about their lives. Yet underneath all the chat is the thrum of worry. The sonographer has just gone to the loo, he says. “She’s not incontinent,” she fires back. Something must be wrong.

Over the next five scenes, the consequences of the scan verdict are examined. The couple who are so full of hope are faced with terrifying, terrible dilemmas; their lives are changed forever by what happens in that room.

The play is superbly written, never losing either its tension (so I don’t want to give too much away), its humour or its ability to involve the audience in this searing set of choices. It is also magnificently acted by Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy, both utterly convincing as a couple coping with too much: she is all passion, fury and despair, he is more gentle, clinging tentatively to rationality and hope, both trying to make it through. Lena Kaur makes a perfectly pitched contribution as a matter-of-fact, but kindly midwife.

Director Jeremy Herrin lets the conversations – punctuated with quite long blackouts – unfold at a gripping, but carefully modulated pace, allowing grief, joy, doubt and poetry all to arrive and make their mark, never rushing things. Both music and silence hold their place in the story.

Meanwhile, designer Grace Smart and lighting designer Jessica Hung Han Yun pinion the scenes into tight spaces, full of naturalistic detail and changing light – a hospital room, a bathroom, a bedroom – which provide a metaphorical image of the devastation the couple feel as their life and their dreams constrict around them.

For all the agony, Guess How Much I Love You? is a play illuminated by love. It takes an extreme version of the fears facing every couple who have ever tried for a baby and examines it with compassion and sensitivity. It doesn’t have any huge relevance beyond itself, but it does shine a light on ordinary people faced with extraordinary circumstances and lets them live on stage.