Guess How Much I Love You? review – A fearlessly intense foray into the unthinkable

Don’t be misled by the gentle-sounding title. Luke Norris’s play is a fearlessly intense foray into places no one wants to go to – or truly believes they ever will. It starts with a couple at their 20-week antenatal scan, their hope visibly curdling as they realise the road ahead isn’t the sweetly straightforward one they’d imagined. Then, it follows them to the proverbial hell and back, in an emotionally exhausting journey through suffering and redemption.

A brilliantly fiery Rosie Sheehy plays an expectant mother who’s almost physically allergic to platitudes and sentiment. She instinctively senses that the technician has seen something on the scan – a worrying thing, that’s made her bustle from the room. But her partner is less sure. Robert Aramayo gives this determinedly “nice” bloke a faintly frantic energy as he tries to dispel her worries, only to get drawn into a slanging match about his porn habits. Their dynamic exposes the essential untruth behind the phrase “we are pregnant”. Yes, they’re both expecting a baby, but it’s her body that’s bearing the pain – and societal blame.

There’s a dense tangle of cliches and taboos and half-truths that we use around pregnancy and birth, in an attempt to hide their messy, ugly realities. Norris’s play cuts a ruthlessly clear path through them, talking about the blood-soaked pads and the bedpans full of vomit. Sheehy saturates each scene with a sense of constant nervous exhaustion – she’s so drained by what’s going on inside her that her partner is an often unwelcome distraction. Especially when he reads her poetry. Aramayo’s role feels a little less nourished here. Biology has blocked him out of a process that deeply concerns him, and there’s a huge amount of pain that comes with that. But here, there’s not as much sense of what’s boiling under his more robust exterior, or why he keeps harking back to literary greats or still higher powers. Sometimes, the pair’s scenes together slip into an overly repetitive dynamic, and linger on a little too long.

Still, Guess How Much I Love You? is also both very funny and impressively solid in its structure. It feels like a TV five-parter in miniature, with Jeremy Herrin’s lucid, psychologically astute production dividing each closely naturalistic scene with an impenetrable wall of darkness and noise.

We never get to see how its central couple functions when tragedy isn’t weighing them down. But the final scene gives us space to imagine what they could be. For all its overpowering bleakness, there’s something ultimately hopeful about Norris’s play, and the way that he details every hideous contour of this pair’s suffering – then shows us that this, too, is survivable.

Until 21 February