Good With Faces

Good With Faces is a two-hander in which a mother is interviewed by a social worker about the care of her son Max. We never see Max; instead, we watch the power dance between the two adults as what begins with milk, biscuits, and found fingernails gradually becomes something much darker and weirder.

Clodagh Mooney Duggan is particularly good as Garrick, initially composed and gradually unravelling under Hegarty’s playing and prying, before somehow regaining control towards the end. Patrick McBrearty’s Hegarty is in equal parts convincing and slippery. The whole thing tips into horror as the investigation moves towards child abuse and a deeply disturbing relationship between mother and son.

What makes the two performances work is that neither character is particularly easy to place, or to like for that matter. Both become good villains in their own right - unlikely ones at that. Hegarty, a graduate of the care system, seems to be attempting to right some wrongs by playing the travelling child snatcher. Yet another face to the play's perverse treatment of power. Garrick, meanwhile, is far more manipulative than her demeanour initially suggests: as her surface is scratched, class prejudices gradually spill out, as audience expectations are constantly built and shattered with the story’s twists into absurdity.

That absurdity is clever in how surprising it is. What seems quite straight, even mundane, gradually reveals itself as something much more harrowing. By this point, though, the twists do pile up, and the story occasionally asks us to follow it a little further than feels entirely comfortable.

There was a fairly fundamental problem, though: it was often difficult to hear the dialogue. The air conditioning did not help, and the actors’ positioning away from the audience in the thrust meant that some lines simply disappeared. I could hear people around me whispering to ask what had been said.

Very good acting, a disturbing power game, and a play that gets stranger the further it goes.

Good With Faces by Oisín Kearney. Credit Larissa Pinkham.