Guess How Much I Love You? review

The most raw, most intensely private moments are strung together in this agonising and absorbing new play by Luke Norris, its scenes like the barbs on a length of razor wire. As it tightens and unspools, in an unsparing production by Jeremy Herrin, its agonies accumulate. These are of the domestic variety, the kind of cataclysms that befall ordinary people, behind unremarkable front doors. And in the wake of their devastation, life must – and does – go on. Norris’ chamber drama, wrapped around a couple in their 30s, Him (Robert Aramayo) and Her (Rosie Sheehy), is a sort of gloriously profane hymn to hope and human resilience, and to love; mingled with the obliterating pain is passion and poetry, tenderness and laughter, faith and deep despair. It’s mercilessly concentrated and intimate, almost as if the characters are being gradually stripped of their skin. And yet the writing also exudes a profound compassion.

It takes place mostly in a series of miniature interiors designed by Grace Smart, each one meticulously realised, until a final, dreamlike sequence that signals a new phase in the pair’s relationship cycle. To reveal too much about each setting, and what occurs there, would be to wreck Norris’ delicate structure, in which we follow Him and Her’s fortunes with breathless attention, as wrong-footed as they are by the blows they are dealt, the unexpected atoms of comfort and the extreme stress under which their loving relationship is placed. But I can reveal that we begin in a hospital ultrasound unit, where they have been unexpectedly left alone, mid-scan. They kill time in bantering word games, serrated bickering and debating possible names for the baby they’ve just seen on screen. What they will be told about the child who already has eyelashes and is sucking his thumb will irrevocably alter them. What does love really mean, what are its limits and can their love possibly be strong enough to withstand what’s coming?
Continues...