GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?

Royal Court Theatre

★★★★★

“keeping you engaged from start to end and revealing deep truths along the way”

A couple waits in a hospital room, on the brink of labour. To pass the time, they play 20 Questions, trying to guess a character.

“Am I alive?”

“Maybe?”

Small, playful moments that feel ordinary and deeply intimate.

Rosie Sheehy, as the woman in labour, invites us into her world with a blunt, feminist voice that is both exquisite and hilariously honest. Robert Aramayo plays her partner with warmth, playfulness, and unwavering support, matching her wit beat for beat. Together, they give the immediate sense of a couple who have been together forever, who know each other inside out, who can talk about absolutely anything.

Written by Luke Norris, the play is rich with beautiful humour and a powerful, deeply felt depiction of a relationship riding an emotional rollercoaster. The jokes are sharp and natural, immediately welcoming us into the profound bond these two people share.

It soon becomes clear that the humour does more than showcase their connection – it also acts as a shield, attempting to mask an underlying tension slowly rising beneath the surface. No one – neither the couple nor the audience – is prepared for what’s to come.

Sheehy and Aramayo’s performances are undeniably stunning. They hold you in a constant state of attention, your eyes fixed on them. Through silence, emotional vulnerability, and moments of lightness, they offer their entire emotional world with generosity and precision. Their chemistry is electric, allowing us to witness the full arc of their relationship and individual emotional journeys with striking clarity.

Lena Kaur also appears as the midwife, delivering a beautiful performance that is equally funny and grounded.

Directed by Jeremy Herrin, the transitions between scenes are beautifully handled. Grounded in a realistic set designed by Grace Smart, we move swiftly through hospital rooms and private spaces, travelling with the couple across different times and places as their story unfolds. We are with them in every moment of their life together.

The story confronts the hardest moments that any couple – or any person – may face. A recurring thread weaves through the play, returning us again and again to questions that intensify its emotional core:

How do I love you when the sun no longer makes sense?

How much do I love you when part of me no longer feels alive? When sadness takes over?

It is not a comforting, “everything will be fine” kind of show. It doesn’t promise happy endings or ideal outcomes. Instead, it offers truth about real relationships, real hardship, and the terrifying choice between leaving or staying. It is about facing yourself and the other at their worst, and choosing love anyway.

Guess How Much I Love You captures this with raw authenticity, keeping you engaged from start to end and revealing deep truths along the way.

A few scenes may linger slightly longer than necessary, but this is minor compared to the emotional richness the play leaves behind. A work of rare honesty – and an absolute must-see.

GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?

Royal Court Theatre

Reviewed on 22nd January 2026

by Nasia Ntalla

Photography by Johan Persson

GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?

CLIVE

Arcola Theatre

★★★

“the play, having built a world so rich with eccentricity, opts for a resolution that feels strangely cautious”

Thomas is working from home. He has been for years. But practitioners of this common condition will know immediately that something isn’t right about Thomas’s WFH set-up.

There is no pile of damp laundry, no mewling toddler pawing at his ankles wanting Bluey on the iPad, no mild burbling of Test Match Special in the background.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

In designer Mike Britton’s blistering set, Thomas’s home is antiseptic white. Clean-lined desk and chair. Laptop and phone. There’s a wall of white Ikea type cupboards upstage (which become a minor character in their own right thanks to Chris Davey’s clever lighting) and, finally and most impressively, the remarkable wipe-clean vinyl floor.

We meet fastidious Thomas with his mop shoes on, choo-chooing around the space, spritzing invisible germs with a bleach cleaner. Top half: shirt and tie for the Zoom; bottom half: boxers and bare feet.

Thomas tells us about life in his canal side apartment and, more particularly, we learn about his work in IT through video calls and emails, which he recounts to us with a bitchy relish. Actor Paul Keating does his best work of the hour as the office gossip, relaying who’s in and who’s out and the rise of the dreaded Naomi, the new COO.

He loved the office. He misses the sense of community. He was “the only person who reads the manuals” so he was on hand with the coffee maker and the faulty printer. He was a stalwart of cake-based gatherings and bantz.

Award-winning playwright Michael Wynne has a pitch-perfect ear for the soulless, jollying-along jargon of the modern hybrid office – “you’re on mute” – and later, when things turn dark, how this hollow dialect becomes the banal language of corporate oppression and bullying.

Because Naomi has Thomas in his sights. Oh yes, Thomas is next for the cull. There are meetings with the “Head of People”, bogus allegations of incompetence and his sociability is weaponised as inappropriate.

Thomas is defined by his job, so without it his sequestered life collapses into drift and disorientation. He loses perspective…

And here, sadly, is where director Lucy Bailey’s vivid and sharply designed production begins to falter.

Perhaps the surreal brilliance of Severance or Brazil hovers overhead and infects our expectations – because by now, with the eye-scorching whiteness of the set, the emptiness of corporate speech, and the quirks of isolated Thomas, we’re primed for something stranger.

But the play, having built a world so rich with eccentricity, opts for a resolution that feels strangely cautious. Thomas’s descent gestures toward a dramatic rupture but lands on something more recognisable – a soft undoing, wrapped in quotidian trauma.

Take, for example, Clive the four-foot cactus, headliner, and a prop of prickly promise. It remains just that – static and symbolic, never quite earning the weight the play seems to assign it. We keep waiting for the twist, the outlandish transformation. It never comes. It is briefly a metaphor – life is spiky, brush it the wrong way and it wounds – but then it retreats into anonymity.

None of this reflects on Keating’s personable, warm-hearted performance. He is a winning presence, never better than when re-arranging his baked beans “labels out”. The production is a short, witty takedown of WFH signifiers. It just runs out of invention 20 minutes too soon.

Tag Archives: Nick Powell

GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?

★★★★★

Royal Court Theatre

GUESS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU?

Royal Court Theatre

★★★★★

“keeping you engaged from start to end and revealing deep truths along the way”