FringeReview UK 2026

Guess How Much I Love You?

Royal Court

Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“Alive or dead?” A couple (Her and Him) badinage in an ultrasound room, playing 20 Questions and to Her’s questions He (Him) plays Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. It’s a quick-fire displacement. If that’s the start much later Him reads a story about hares giving this play its title. He breaks down. It opens the fourth of six scenes. Actor Luke Norris’s Guess How Much I Love You? opens at Royal Court’s Downstairs directed by Jeremy Herrin till February 21.

Realism and raw emotions have been a hallmark of David Byrne’s tenure. He opens the Royal Courts 70^th anniversary with this particularly intimate, seemingly naturalistic play of Norris’s: not just explosively raw but cunning in its reveals. Each scene culminates in a reveal of the state of the baby who the couple spend as much time trying to name as place. Their chid has a fifty-fifty chance of survival: prospects afterwards are bleak.

It’s a shattering play about parenthood, grief and aftermath; we’re handed a small card to address this.

Like most actors who turn to writing plays, Norris has an instinct for quicksilver dialogue and lines not so much pared to the bone as singing with distress. It’s memorably disinhibited in tone and twists breathtaking risks with jagged metaphors: there’s no whiff of weighty zeitgeist. Yet it’s built to last. It will continue to distress some too; on occasion the performance has to be stopped.

Her (Rosie Sheehy) Him (Robert Aramayo) are almost alone for the entire play, interrupted by Midwife (a quietly matter-of-fact yet nuanced Lena Kaur) in the third scene; and a surprise in the last. A discovery as the door opens at the end of the first scene propels into a bedroom scene where we discover what’s revealed and choices faced; or not. Her memorably proclaims “What happens next is I’m a death camp.” Then to a neo-natal bed in the hospital, then a private room not their own, a bathroom and finally, briefly, a beach.

That badinage often resurfaces in the intense, sometimes elliptical ferocity of dialogue, especially in the first, second and fifth scenes.  In ninety-five minutes a huge ground of exchanges, mostly brief, is covered: but a vast emotional range from. screamingly displaced hatred through to consolatory numbness.

Aramayo’s Him starts quoting Yeats twice (‘Innisfree’ and the dark ‘The Stolen Child’ eliciting a protest from Her: “The world is more full of weeping than you can understand” hardly consoles. Him has a Catholic upbringing that gradually tints his responses over the course of the six scenes. He quotes Hamlet a lot, around the loss of faith (Norris has performed in it); just as he starts praying. An attentive, sensitively literary partner, he’s frustrated by Her’s withdrawal and begins a potential retreat into a world Her won’t follow. “You are the ashes of my son” seems almost unanswerable, but Her has somehow invited just such a summary: almost compelled it.

Sheehy’s Her gives the kind of performance you might expect after her stunning roles in Machinal and The Brightening Air. The intensity of Her pulses on Sheehy’s face, quivers in violent gestures and shows as Her throws paroxysms of grief and denial, nearly all at her partner. There’s lines worthy of any existential or even Beckettian play and Sheehy can register the abyss quietly too.  Her asks Lena Kaur’s midwife to shut the curtains against a warm 36-degree May day: “The sun doesn’t make any sense.” That’s not just a reflection of a state of mind, though it lands with a terrible grace. It’s a small coda to this being a world in the near future where 36 degrees in May is becoming possible.

Grace Smart’s six-scene set is like detailed lightning: built on a revolve that shifts in blackouts where Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting nuances everything from a curtained ward with sunlight to a bathroom to a beach. Each moment is differentiated, each – though more or less spacious and in various shades like white or sage – brings its own claustrophobia: till the very last releases the bare walls. Nick Powell’s composition and sound design is remarkable for its restraint, allowing gulphs of silence to intervene over such long stretches you can (unusually) hear the tube rattling faintly through the walls.

After the most savage recriminatory trawl of their lives and family, you wonder what the outcome might be. The scenes hint at it, and the language never falters: nor indeed the reveals Norris emerges with a style ready-formed and a stagecraft quite exceptionally deft. Some will find Guess How Much I Love You? Accessing a ready vein of sentiment. There is though no sentimentality, and the extremes scoured here answer any such charge.It is unashamedly visceral: most will accept that. It does though rightly come with warnings. “Sometimes I hate you.” “You hair is death.” Sheehy and Aramayo are phenomenal and wholly believable. Norris’s next play will be worth seeking out, after such an outstanding debut.

Casting Director Jessica Ronane CDG, Dramaturg Gillian Greer, Casting Associates Abby Galvin CDG, Saffeya Shabil,  Intimacy Co-ordinator Clare Foster, Assistant Director Charlotte Vickers,

Production Manager Zara Drohan, Costume Supervisor Lucy Walshaw, Company Manager Mica Taylor, Stage Managers Anna-Marie Casson, Heidi Lennard, DSMs Rike Berg, Natalie Braid, ASM Maddie Sidi

Stage Supervisor Steve Evans, Stage Show Technician Oscar Sale, Lighting Supervisor Lucinda Plummer, Lighting Programmer Lizzie Skellett, Lighting Operator Isabel Wolf, Stage Lighting Crew Sophie Dreyer, Sound Operator Bill Keogh, Stage Crew Lee West, Zack Willis, Dresser Katie Pollard, Costumer Maker Anna Barcock, Wellbeing Support The Artist Wellbeing Company (Tricia Gannon) Set Build Illusion Design & Construct, Lead Producer Hannah Lyall, Executive Producer Steven Atkinson.

With thanks to support from Nicola Kerr.

Published January 24, 2026January 26, 2026 by Simon Jenner