Oisín Kearney’s Good With Faces is reviewed as a tense, highly assured psychological thriller about a fraught meeting between a newly single mother and a social worker investigating her son’s bruise. The production matters for its unsettling examination of power, suspicion and abuse, using a tightly controlled two-person confrontation to expose the pressures surrounding parenting and care work.

Patrick McBrearty plays Hegarty, who records his interview with Clodagh Mooney Duggan’s Garrick in her hastily tidied home, initially presenting it as routine procedure. As it emerges that he already knows more than he admits, Garrick reverses the pressure; small gestures, pauses and ordinary details acquire threatening significance, supported by Katie Richardson’s discordant sound design. The play runs for an hour at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August.