Luke Norris’s first play in an age quite doesn’t have an M Night Shyamalan-level twist, but it does take a few pretty shocking turns from quite early on, and for that reason I’m going to talk about the plot in maddeningly general terms, so sorry for that.
As Guess How Much I Love You? begins, we meet Him (Robert Aramyo) and Her (Rosie Sheehy), a thirtysomething married couple who have come to hospital for what is presumably their 20-week scan. They are, for want of a better word, bantering: the sonographer has left the room and they’re idling away the time chatting shit about baby names and whether or not he’s into porn. She’s fiery and intense, he’s garrulous and philosophical. They’re a good couple.
There is a nagging worry, however: the two are debating over why the sonographer has been away so long and whether or not she looked worried when she left.
To say how this resolves itself would be to give too much away. But what I will say is that as a certified two-time parent, I found Guess How Much I Love You? – which does indeed take its name from the classic picturebook – to be a painfully acute portrait of the stress early parenthood can put on a relationship. Not in some sort of weird self-pitying way, but just that it’s very good and clear and unsentimental on how parenthood not only puts you through the emotional wringer, but how it totally recontexualises your relationship to your partner, as you have to almost start anew in a situation of maximum stress.
Of course it’s harder on the person giving birth, a point Norris and the incandescent Sheehy make well here. And indeed, it’s the depths of rage and despair she plumbs that create the distance between her and him. A slightly bumbling but sensitive, poetry-quoting nice guy, Aramyo finds himself hurt and baffled by the distance between them and his sudden abrupt moves to an object of, at best, obsolescence.
I wouldn’t say the couple’s exact situation is going to be the majority of people’s experience of parenthood (albeit it’s an extreme rather than implausible case). And it’s worth stressing that while not totally devoid of light, this feels like a pointedly bleak play, selectively pared back to plumb the darkest depths of parenthood, a deep sea emotional sub. Norris isn’t trying to show a balanced account of what parenthood typically does to a couple, but rather the dark places it can go. Most parents are liable to experience a bit of what this pair experience – but theirs is the uncut form. But even accepting it’s a relief to have not been entirely in their boat, Guess How Much I Love You? does ring painfully emotionally true.
The sense of paring things back is matched by Jeremy Herrin’s production, which is naturalistic and uncluttered. But there’s a little more to it than that. The relative lack of other cast members (Lena Kaur plays a midwife in one scene) and the fact Grace Smart’s sets don’t tend to fill the stage, but rather sit in inky pools of darkness, gives it an unsettling, claustrophobic feel. It also has a discrete, disorientating razzle dazzle gained from each of its six scenes having a totally different set, the changes effected silently and startlingly during brief blackout interludes.
There’s such an exquisite purity to its bleakness that the theatre wanker within me felt a twinge of resentment when Guess How Much I Love You? ended on a relatively happy note. But actually that’s parenthood: you touch the abyss for a bit, and then you pretty much have to pull yourself back. Good times!
