This year the Royal Court is 70 years old. Yes, it’s that long since this premiere new writing venue staged its opening season, whose third play was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a drama which redefined British theatre. The current celebratory year kicks off with Guess How Much I Love You?, by Luke Norris, whose debut Goodbye to All That was successfully staged here in 2012. Since then, the playwright has provoked interest with several theatre and television pieces, including the BBC’s Poldark and So Here We Are at the Manchester Royal Exchange. But because he’s hardly produced more than a handful of good work in over a decade, this drama is a really risky choice to begin this significant season. Unless, that is, the new play is brilliant.
And I’m happy to say that it certainly is, and then some. A couple in their thirties, Her and Him, are waiting in hospital for the results of their 20-week scan. Is their baby okay? As she sits with her bump covered in gel, he tries to take their minds off this anxious time (why is the doctor taking so long to see them?), by playing 20 Questions and suggesting names for the child. If the outcome of the scan was a happy one there would not be much of drama, so clearly something is wrong. Which leads inevitably to any young couple’s nightmare: if the baby has a birth defect, what should they do? Should they abort the damaged foetus, or brace themselves to life with a child which has a disability, severe or otherwise?
Norris’s account of what happens next plays out over five more scenes and 95 minutes. The writing is vividly realistic, accurate in its depiction of extreme emotions, and profoundly compassionate in its feelings for the couple, which are intended be Everyman and Everywoman. The dialogues are a powerful mixture of ordinary chat, heightened emotional interaction and, occasionally, some more strikingly writerly passages: a recurring dream of a red-haired boy playing on a beach; Her violently antagonistic attack on Him which culminates in the savage repetition of “Grow up”. The overall result is an excruciatingly strong account of devastating emotions and terrible ethical dilemmas. It’s fierce in intensity, and desperately moving in its impact.
What’s particularly acute is the way that Norris shows the gendered nature of his story. Although both parents confront the same problem, clearly it’s the woman’s body that has to bear the brunt of what happens. Both Her and Him are completely overwhelmed, but it is she that has to cope most deeply with the events. And this creates a psychological imbalance and a tension that pushes their relationship to further extremes. This is a story about some of the worst things that can happen to a couple, and Norris does not shy away from showing them explicitly, with sincerity and emotional truth. In one scene the technical details of treatment are appallingly heartrending. At times, you long for it all to stop. For your own sake as well as theirs.
As in any example of excellent new writing, there are moments of both humour and beauty in what is basically a two-hander. So there are a couple of passages about porn which are both wry and realistic, much more so than those in the overhyped Porn Play from last year, and the mentions of this couple’s own parents are realistically double-edged. Feelings of guilt, shame and even a religious need for prayer are all part of the couple’s love. At the same time, the play’s title is taken from Sam McBratney’s 1994 children’s book about the Nutbrown Hares, a tale which is used in one of most touching episodes here. Likewise, The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” gives a couple of scenes a suitably melancholic, even retro, air. And, a bit arty this, there’s more than one reference to Hamlet.
While the searing sense of awful experiences runs through the play like painful and unremitting ache that cannot stop, there are also some rather disturbing or questionable assumptions that linger in the mind. While Her and Him are very much a mainstream couple, with mild eccentricities undisturbed by feelings of great individuality, there is a rather unsettling sense that they equate abortion with murder, an idea that is never really confronted full on. The shadow of the Catholic Church lingers in the background of the play, gently but noticeably pressing against this couple’s moral choices.
Anyway, material as deeply affecting as all this requires fine directing and convincing acting. And it gets all of that from Jeremy Herrin’s production, whose designer Grace Smart creates the muted pastel colours of more than one institutional room, as well as a couple of recognizably ordinary domestic interiors. Rosie Sheehy and Robert Aramayo are perfect as the couple, coming up with extraordinarily detailed and utterly convincing performances, beautifully contrasted. Her has greater emotional intelligence, but also an anxious feeling of needing to protect herself from too much openness; Him is more airily chatty, but with a sense of being excluded from women’s experiences.
Together, and joined in one exceptionally fraught scene by the hospital midwife (Lena Kaur), Sheehy and Aramayo take us on a journey that is both agonising yet also affirmative of the power of love’s survival in a climate of adversity. It’s a very hard watch, but also, by the end, oddly uplifting. A good balance, right? At the same time it’s a demonstration not only of the power of theatre to dig into common, if also taboo-charged, experiences, but likewise a testament to the relevance of the Royal Court’s project of staging the best, and most beautiful, intense new writing it can find. Happy 70th!
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