Guess How Much I Love You? at Royal Court Theatre

Last Updated on January 23, 2026

An unflinching navigation of family tragedy

“I will arise and go now, for peace comes dropping slow,” reads the male lead to his bed-bound partner and their dying, severely disabled newborn boy. These lines sing out in Guess How Much I Love You?, Luke Norris’s new play about a couple navigating the premature loss of their child. Yeats’s words capture the play’s driving emotional forces: the possibility of finding peace after such profound trauma, the lifelong burn of unexpected bereavement and the temptation to end it all. It’s a towering exploration of how infant death and impossible choices twist love into excruciating shapes.

We meet the protagonists – a young, expecting couple – in a London hospital as they await results from their 12-week scan. They’re playing Twenty Questions to kill time. BIFA Award-winner Robert Aramayo (I Swear) is an excited, soon-to-be dad, quoting Shakespeare and bouncing warm-heartedly around his partner. Rosie Sheehy (Machinal) is a quick-witted, unflinchingly honest presence – at once irritated and endeared by her partner’s eccentricities.

Their love is instantly convincing. It sings from director Jeremy Herrin’s (People, Places and Things) small, semi-circular sets, drawing the audience in with weird humour and generous intimacy. These are lovers, friends, gentle antagonists – characters on the wonderful brink of starting a family.

Act 1 closes suddenly when the sinographer re-enters. The audience is thrown into a full blackout – a recurring theme – and rejoins the couple in their bedroom.

Something unimaginable has happened. Their baby has been diagnosed with severe spina bifida – a congenital condition that, in their case, all but guarantees constant pain, profound disability and round-the-clock care. The couple grapple with this tragedy and each other’s responses to it – what does this mean for their unborn child’s future, for parenthood, and for the couple’s love and hopes? Is aborting the pregnancy an option? What kind of parents are they capable of being?

The play lifts off from here. Labour is medically induced, and the third act, a long scene in a hospital room with their premature son as he deteriorates, forms the core of the drama. Lena Kaur (Expendable) sensitively plays a midwife who twice arrives to check on the child as he dies.

Sixteen years after Luke Norris’s Royal Court debut, Goodbye To All That, a play about family tensions in later life, Guess How Much I Love You? cements him as an expert in the shared spaces of shock, love and loss. Norris’s writing shines for its dives across humour and desolation. Dialogue zips between the protagonists, directed by Jeremy Herrin to strike like gunfire, aggression and tenderness blurring together.

The intensity of the protagonist’s relationship never wanes. It’s as if a taught wire connects them on stage. They haul each other through excruciating choices, working as much in opposition as in unison. Sheehy’s ability to switch from ironic jabs to gut-wrenching grief is the fuel of the play. Her character is largely static – sitting or lying in bed – but she travels great interior distances. Despair becomes a landscape in Guess How Much I Love You? – Sheehy is its map, explored slowly, becoming cryptic at times, always full of revelations and dead ends. Aramayo is equally impressive. His physical buoyancy is perfectly pitched to accentuate Sheedy’s pain, and his sorrow is bursting and constrained all at once.

The staging is precise and effective. Director Herrin and designer Grace Smart progressively shrink the dimensions of the sets. Guess How Much I Love You? is demanding because it brings monumental themes – the life and death of a baby – into these interior spaces. A small hospital room becomes a smaller bedroom; a waiting room becomes a cramped bathroom. This heightens the claustrophobia and binds the characters on a shared trajectory of emotional enclosure.

As the couple are forced together on stage, the world condenses around them to a singular focus point: the lost life of their child. His death is increasingly “the biggest thing in every room,” as Sheehy’s character puts it. And the heft of Aramayo and Sheehy’s acting indeed swells the implications of this tiny life to fill the Royal Court’s main auditorium.

The wisdom of Norris’s writing is its treatment of love and loss like two currents in the same tide. They swell together into a force of nature – something to fight against, to pull through. His characters sometimes weigh each other down, drowning together in horrible confusion, then breaching the surface for air again, buoyed up by laughter, or fear, or rage. What counts is that they keep each other’s heads above the surface. Guess How Much I Love You? jolts you to the cutting edge of surviving the unthinkable. It’s bold theatre not to be missed.

Guess How Much I Love You? runs at the Royal Court Theatre from 21st January to 21st February.

Royal Court Theatre

Sloane Square,
Chelsea
London
SW1W 8AS