Orphans

The first and most important thing to make clear about Dennis Kelly's new play is that is it a fantastic piece of entertainment. It's billed as a psychological thriller, and it delivers two hours of perfectly maintained tension revolving around a series of ever more complex moral dilemmas.

The second thing to stress is that while an undercurrent of fear is ever-present, there are also a lot of laughs. This doesn't mean the writer has thrown in some clever-clever lines to lighten the mood; rather, he has carefully crafted the dialogue to highlight the absurdity of exchanges that are both believable and deadly serious.

At this point you could be forgiven for skipping to the ticket details, but a glance at the companies responsible for Orphans provide the clue that there's much more on offer here than suspense and comedy. This is a play about family, loyalty, violence and shattered hopes. It's a political play without the usual sledgehammer bias that weaves a tangled web taking in child protection, vigilante justice, racial tensions and social isolation. It's just as well the writer threw in the aforementioned laughs.

The bare bones of the plot have echoes of earlier works – to reveal which ones would constitute an unforgivable spoiler – but what's radical here is the treatment of the characters, and the way in which their past experiences collide with the current state of the nation to inform the life-changing decisions they make.

Helen and Liam are the orphans of the title, and their troubles didn't begin when their parents died. Helen's husband Danny wants what's best for his family, but isn't accustomed to making sacrifices.

The cast is simply outstanding. Under director Roxana Silbert the trio have found the rhythm of Kelly's writing and once the play begins, with the arrival of a blood-covered Liam at his sister's home, they don't miss a single beat.

As Helen, Claire-Louise Cordwell is a sharp, logical survivor who is miles away from the usual portrayal of an adult who spent time in care as a child; as Danny, Jonathan McGuinness is a man struggling to meet the expectations of a woman who is accustomed to looking after herself; and as Liam, Joe Armstrong gives a wonderfully nuanced performance that leaves the audience torn between sympathy and mistrust.

This isn't a play of cheap shocks and twists: the audience is led by a breadcrumb trail into increasingly dark territory. There's plenty of scope for “What would you do?” conversations in the interval, but by the end the question has become “What can we do?”, and the play doesn't offer any easy answers.