The directors’ projects at this year's SEEDS Showcase are a study in contrasts. Where Dying City is a restrained and intimate study of grief for two actors, Serious Money is a complex, multi-stranded, postmodern performance piece for an ensemble of fifteen. However, both of the plays present problems for the young directors. Dying City is so structurally and theatrically understated that it allows for little directorial flourish, while Serious Money ­– as with most of Caryl Churchill’s work – is deeply embedded in the social context of Thatcherite Britain and in the performance context of devised/workshop ensemble theatre. For Kennedy, then, the challenge is to impose his vision on so spare a text, and for Spillane-Hinks to reign in and make relevant a challenging and dated play.

Set in the wake of 9/11 Dying City examines the lives of those affected by its aftermath: therapist Kelly and her boyfriend-soldier Craig, who watched the towers burn from their New York apartment; and Peter, Craig’s identical twin, who remembers the calm of their relationship amidst the chaos of the terror attacks outside. The play shifts between time-periods: the present day, where Kelly, living alone after Craig’s suicide in Iraq, has closed herself off from the world; and the eve of Craig’s departure for Iraq for what would become his final tour of duty.

Borrowing a conceit from his 2003 play The Coming World, Shinn uses the characters of identical twins to add energy to the confined dramaturgy of the single-setting play. The brothers’ oppositional characterisations, however – gay actor (Peter), sexually and emotionally repressed soldier (Craig) – give little to Paul Mallon to work with. As Craig is used to explore action, and Peter consequence, there is little sense of the complexity of human nature, or the subtleties of cause and effect. Meanwhile, as a professional therapist, Kelly serves a conduit for the difficulties of her clients, but she also appears as a conduit here for the "drama” of the twins. Gemma Mae Halligan is simultaneously evasive and brutally honest: the perfect therapist, refusing to give any of herself away, while determined to prompt Peter towards self-realisation. Her emotional closure, however - studied and affecting embodiment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as it is - strips the sense of conflict further from Kennedy’s static production.

Alyson Cummins’ unreadable set complements Kelly’s emotional blankness, and sliding doors allow for quick transitions between the time periods. Kevin Smith’s colour-coded lighting is less effective, and there is no sense of a shift in atmosphere or tone, or even time of day, between the two periods. There is the possibility within the text to interpret the scenes as symptoms of Kelly’s grief – a nightmare intrusion of memory – when she is trying to move on, but Kennedy fails to even suggest such ambiguity. Where the effect should be disturbing, Dying City is as superficially enjoyable to watch as an episode of 'Law and Order'. But where Kelly admits watching the crime show for the “symbolic reversal”, we have no such depth here.

Serious Money presents a dying city of a different kind: a city buckling under the weight of its own corruption and greed. The time is the late 1980s, the city is London - but Spillane-Hinks is clearly setting the culture of capitalist exhilaration in Churchill’s play as a morality tale for the current economic crisis.

Using rhyming verse, direct address, multi-role-playing actors and characters, and musical numbers, it is a complex piece that demands a huge amount of skill and co-operation from its fifteen performers. While the SEEDS Showcase must be commended for embracing largely unknown actors to complement the fostering of young directors and designers, it poses a problem here for Spillane-Hinks. Diction and pacing problems render considerable reams of the dense dialogue and exposition incomprehensible, while the ensemble never seem entirely comfortable together. The exception is, surprisingly, in the musical numbers which bookend the interval and the finale. There are some noteworthy individual performances too: from Valerie O’Connor and Aonghus Óg McAnally in particular.

The Cube space downstairs in Project also poses some challenges to the production. Alyson Cummin’s fine double-tiered stock-market skeleton inhabits the space at an angle, allowing for full use of corners and multi-level sightlines, and Spillane-Hinks allows the actors to use the stairwell of the seating area too, so that every inch of the theatre is exploited. However, intimacy is not complementary to the exaggerated performance style, and the chaos of Churchill’s play is thus never reined in for full coherence.

Yet Spillane-Hinks must be commended for refusing to play it safe and there are many moments when the risk pays off, paticularly in her overall vision for the play as evidenced by the mood-setting contributions of her design collaborators. Where Kevin Smith’s shadowy atmospheric lighting shapes the play as an expressionistic political thriller, Denis Clohessy’s original score brings a tone of cartoon absurdity – James Bond meets The Pink Panther – to proceedings that stay faithful to the fun and energy of Churchill's vision.

The SEEDS Showcase marks the culmination of the mentorship programme, and the keen display of directing, designing, and production skills are evident here, but as short-listing for the 2010 SEEDS cycle begins, the graduates face their greatest challenge yet: finding work in the real world.

Sara Keating is a critic and journalist. She is a judge for The Irish Times Theatre Awards.