What comes to mind when you think of starting a family? Joy, anticipation, perhaps sleepless nights. But what about loss? Actor-turned-playwright Luke Norris (Poldark) opens the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary season with Guess How Much I Love You?, a poignant new drama directed by Olivier Award-winner Jeremy Herrin.
An unnamed couple, played with remarkable sensitivity by Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo, attend their 20-week pregnancy scan. We first encounter them trading affectionate banter as they wait for the doctor to return after the ultrasound, a moment that quietly but irrevocably alters the course of their lives.
Norris takes the audience on an emotional rollercoaster, intensified by the set’s visual hyper-realism. Designed by Grace Smart, the revolving stage shifts between a sterile consultation room, a lived-in bedroom and a lonely hospital ward. The actors’ emotions are sharpened by the intimacy of the theatre, which has a capacity of 400 people. The couple’s anonymity proves effective. As they observe, there are thousands of couples like them, a reminder that pregnancy complications could happen to anyone.
Theatre is at its most powerful when it captures the rawness of human experience. Norris’s writing subtly subverts our sense of what is unfolding, inviting us to fill in the gaps with our own emotions. The initial result is a profound empathy for the characters and a wish that events are taking a turn for the better – only for that hope to be undone.
Norris does not shy away from ugliness. Instead, the play strikes a delicate balance between moments of levity and grief. The characters are not written as ideals: they are flawed, impulsive and prone to saying things they later regret. This is not a play that tells us how we ought to be, but one that reflects people back to us as they are. Here, art imitates life and nudges us towards acceptance of what makes us human.
Guess How Much I Love You?
Royal Court Theatre, London SW1. Until 21 February
[Further reading: Park Chan-wook couldn’t save “No Other Choice”]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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