The trigger warnings are handed to us on a card as we file into the auditorium. For good reason: Luke Norris’s play is a harrowing portrait of pregnancy and grief, plumbing the depths of sorrow within a marriage. But it is not only that. It is funny and profound, intense without ever becoming overwrought.
The play follows a thirtysomething couple who remain unnamed, just like their baby, as they navigate loss. Their relationship seems to feed off a sparky kind of contrariness. She (Rosie Sheehy) is clever, ferocious, always up for a fight. He (Robert Aramayo) is gentler, using humour – and poetry, even in the face of her jeering – to soften her edges. Their dialogue sounds like a contact sport – ricocheting, fast and furious – while they wait for the results of their 20-week ultrasound scan in the first scene.
The news is painful, we realise in the following scene. Terrible choices have to be made around the birth of their baby. Sheehy and Aramayo give explosive performances, matching each other’s intensity in different ways. This story is so dark (“Are we at the bottom yet?” he asks her) but you do not want to miss a second of it.
Directed by Jeremy Herrin, the play change gears from savage to tender, devastating to humorous, and is self-assured in showing us the shape of grief. Norris, better known as an actor, distinguished himself as a writer with Goodbye to All That, which was staged upstairs at the Royal Court in 2012. This confirms his talent as a playwright of depth and flair.
Plot twists bring shock and dread, but alongside this there is both whimsy and deep rumination on mortality, including a mystical element that skirts around dreams and other worlds and existences.
It is strikingly staged, with blackouts between scenes. Grace Smart’s set design changes at speed in the dark, a new milieu emerging out of it suddenly – the couple’s bedroom or would-be nursery taking the place of a hospital room, with dazzling lighting by Jessica Hung Han Yun.
The couple’s fights are visceral, speaking the unspeakable. “Sometimes I hate you,” she says, and he wishes her dead. But through the tears and angry, unreasonable charges they hurl at each other, the love endures. This is a tear-jerker with 100% heart, 0% sentimentality. What a start to the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary season. What an emotional tour de force.
At Royal Court theatre, London, until 21 February
