Two very different plays in very different styles share a Backyard Theatre double bill at Gryphon.

When Up The Duff by Ingrid Berry, solo performer, and Sally Richards, director, premiered in Fringe 07, I pronounced it a premature birth. It’s toddling now in this new production directed by David Austin but it’s not exactly dancing.

With less fuss around changing characters, and more fluidity in the overall production, the compared-and-contrasted tales of two generations of young women finding themselves "up the duff" unfolds with a reasonable degree of clarity. Even so, had I not had the programme to tell me which characters belonged to the late 1950s and which to 2007, plus the clue as to which side of the stage carried what era, I’m sure I’d have wondered why the rather school-marmy ‘Old Maureen’ was referring to WINZ and VCRs in the ante-natal classes she was leading.

As for realising she was the same Maureen who, in her youth, was obliged to give up her "illegitimate" baby for adoption, only the programme and the use of a pair of spectacle offer that clue. It’s a very performance-oriented script, demonstrating its story with broad caricatures and theatrical devices aplenty but lacking in the crucial humanising moments …

Or perhaps the potential is there but the business of getting through it all with just one performer playing a dozen characters in two time-frames gets in the way of our being able to share the empathetic moments. A small ensemble may well bring greater depth and a richer humanity to what so far remains (apart from the sadly underdone songs tentatively sung to appalling pre-recorded music) a proficiently performed piece of well researched social documentary theatre.

Far less important in its content yet providing a more engaging 35 minutes of theatre is Sam Fisher’s Geeks Bearing Gifts, directed by Ingrid Sage.

Gibson (Alex Ness) is a hopeless geek who has commitment problems about his job – as the guy who names paint colours – and is still suffering from a broken engagement three years ago. His new flatmate Charlotte (Elizabeth Marshall) works for his brother and has issues with her parents who are either dead or living in Tauranga or it’s the same difference.

Setting it over the days running up to Christmas intensifies questions of family and loneliness. "Single and not looking" (yeah right), Charlotte is drawn to people who are broken while Gibson clearly wants to move on into a new relationship. What makes this simple little story work is the way Fisher buries their real concerns in subtext and the way Sage ensures her actors focus on it, revealing much through body language, silences and misconceptions.

Some aspects of exactly how ‘the big misunderstanding’ (which I won’t give away) occurs could be made clearer but the resolution, involving accepting people as they are, is suitably heart-warming.

The more subtle and sensitive human dimensions revealed in Geeks Bearing Gifts epitomise what’s missing in Up The Duff, which nevertheless does teach us that while social attitudes are not what they used to be, in come respects the more things change the more they stay the same.  

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer