Dublin Fringe Festival 2025: Good With Faces

Good With Faces. Image, Lost Lens Caps

Technically, this is not a review. For a theatre review you need a play, at least one complete performance and a production presented to the best of their ability. While Oisín Kearney's two hander, Good With Faces, is unquestionably a play, and a very good one, the production last night was not the one intended for an audience. Due, regrettably, to performer Vicky Allen being forced to withdraw due to illness. Requiring a stopgap measure be put in place or else cancelling. Clodagh Mooney Duggan bravely stepping in and reading with script in hand rescuing the night at a moments notice. So why bother writing about it? Well, firstly, Kearney is a seriously good writer who deserves to be better known. Secondly, he's one of the nicest guys in theatre. Thirdly, Good With Faces is a deceptively smart play that deserves to be seen. Finally, conditions might not have been ideal, but there was no sense of being sold short (people could ask for refunds or an alternate night), but rather of a different experience being had. And if it wasn’t quite as compelling as what was intended, it still bristled with its own unquestionable power.

To accommodate Mooney Duggan, director Kearney made a few smart adjustments. Rather than have Mooney Duggan alone with her script in hand, stage partner Patrick McBrearty also sat with a script, lending the whole a sense of a staged reading. Kearney himself sitting stage left in front of a laptop reading stage directions. If the play begins with a rictus in search of a smile, apart from a poignant, final stage image there’s no physical interaction. Stage directions carrying the physical weight, and up to the task, as social worker, Hegarty, interrogates a mother, Anne Garrick, for possible child abuse of a disabled child. Kearney’s stage directions filling in for physical blanks.

Yet Good With Faces is not a whodunnit, having other fish to fry. Indeed, Garrick’s five year old son, like Hegarty’s daughter, serve more as metaphors. A centre around which to pull and push at notions of care, parenting, class, power, powerlessness, despair, and to deeper, often unfulfilled needs to care and be cared for that we never grow out of. All told with Chekhovian economy laced with Absurdist touches. In which, like the superb Offspring currently running as part of DFF, the needs of a parent and child can conflict more often than they harmonise. Begging the question how do you regulate what can feel like sacrifice? Especially when institutional care may mean jumping from the frying pan into the fire?

It’s a testament to Mooney Duggan that not only do you want to see the fully realised version with Allen and McBrearty, you would also love to see an alternate version with an off book Mooney Duggan. McBrearty, even restrained, turns in a mesmerisingly compelling performance as a wounded soul seeking to save itself by saving others. Against which Mooney Duggan conveyed the insecurity and defiance of the interrogated mother with nothing to hide perhaps but her weakness. Mooney Duggan’s exquisite timing, controlled delivery and soul searing stare ensuring you frequently forget she’s reading from a script.

Two laws of theatre. One, Murphy’s Law. If anything can't go wrong it will go wrong. Then there’s the law that states the show must go on. While Allen’s absence was regrettable, for her mostly I’m sure, if ever you're in a tight spot Clodagh Mooney Duggan is who you’ll want in your corner, making it a privilege to watch resilience triumph over adversity. It might not get the Spirit of the Fringe Award, but that spirit was very much in evidence. Whatever version of Good With Faces you can get to see, go see it.

Good With Faces, written and directed by Oisín Kearney, presented in association with Pavilion Theatre, runs as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2025 at Project Arts Centre until September 13.

For more information visit Dublin Fringe Festival 2025