Amnesty International is using culture to do its campaigning in the Women's Day Festival. Belinda McKeon asks the artists involved how they responded to the broad brief

In a rehearsal room high above Dublin's Dame Street, a young woman is talking of terrible things. She talks in the voice of a Sudanese woman who, in a single morning, has been widowed, robbed of her children, gang-raped and left to die by members of the Janja-weed militia. The young woman's voice does not falter; she does not gasp for breath as she recounts this fate, does not dissolve in tears as she spells out the horror of that day. As Kalima, the protagonist of a new monologue by the playwright Stella Feehily, the Kenyan-Irish actor Leah Flynn is calm and precise. "I have deep wounds inside me," she says simply. "I just want to be healed." Sitting with Flynn around the small table, Feehily and Jim Culleton, artistic director of Fishamble theatre company, exhale deeply.

Meanwhile, across the city, the artistic director of another theatre company can almost see himself exhale, so icy is the rehearsal room in which he is putting two performers through the paces of a play by one of the most important writers of post-War Europe, the Austrian Peter Handke. Artist Amanda Coogan and playwright and actor Alex Johnston are finding their way through the allegations and incriminations that comprise Self-Accusation.

Written for two performers, one male and one female, the narrative is a long explosion of responsibility and regret in which it is never clearly indicated who is meant to be speaking, and why. The apparently ceaseless crimes which the play throws in the face of its protagonists range from the unforgivable to the mundane: "I dealt in slaves," they say, moving to "I dealt in uninspected meat", and on to the lesser failings of climbing mountains with the wrong shoes, of failing to wash fresh fruit, of failing to shake bottles of hair lotion before use.

From self-revelation to self-accusation, the business of speaking out demands courage. Fishamble and Bedrock are companies which have both, at various stages in their histories, produced work which epitomises such courage, either stylistically or thematically - think Bedrock's production last year of Caryl Churchill's Far Away, or the "Theatre of Cruelty" season which it hosted in 1997. Or think Fishamble's production of the first play by Mark O'Rowe, From Both Hips, in the same year.

Approached by the Irish branch of Amnesty International to contribute new productions to the cultural strand of its International Women's Day Festival, which runs from Friday until International Women's Day itself on Tuesday, March 8th, both companies committed themselves without hesitation. The only question for Culleton and Bedrock's Jimmy Fay was what to produce; save for requesting that the work touch, in some way, on the issues raised by the festival in question, Amnesty had left them with a completely open brief.

While Fay took the opportunity to produce work by a playwright he had long admired, Culleton turned back to an approach on which Fishamble already made its mark with its 14-play season Shorts in 2003, and three years previously with its six-play Y2K festival: diversity, both of participants and perspectives. He commissioned monologues from nine very different writers: Sebastian Barry, Maeve Binchy, Dermot Bolger, Michael Collins, Stella Feehily, Rosalind Haslett, Róisín Ingle, Marian Keyes and Gavin Kostick. And, not unlike Fay's treatment of Handke, the result achieves a powerful sweep of viewpoints, from the everyday to the incredible.

What he was aiming for, says Culleton, were considerations of the lives of women, both positive and negative; snapshots which could be celebratory just as validly as they could be solemn. So, while Feehily bears witness to the unthinkable suffering - and remarkable survival - of women caught up in the conflict of Darfur, and while Barry touches on the once-more topical subject of Irish sporting prowess and its impact upon domestic violence, Keyes and Bolger depict two love affairs with shoes.

While Binchy, in The Modesty Vest, tells of girlish excitement turned sour, Ingle shows how that sourness can carry on to twist a life in adulthood. While Haslett gives us a woman horribly alone in her misery, and likely because of that isolation to be dismissed as mad, Kostick and Collins show how similar misery and misunderstanding can invade the most respectable marriage; how even an economic boom can do nothing to mask the emotional poverty upon which some relationships are built.

The motif of an item of clothing links the nine monologues; Culleton felt it was important to give the writers a notion with which to get started. "The notion of clothing sparked off ideas from the writers," he explained.

"Sebastian Barry, for example, had been wanting to write about Irish soccer for some time, so when I approached him he said straightaway, yes, I can give you something about a green jersey."

And while many of the resultant pieces are lively and humorous, Culleton feels that the title of the production, She Was Wearing . . . gestures toward the serious work undertaken by Amnesty in its campaign to stamp out domestic and other violence against women; the need for frank testimony, whether in the courtroom or the classroom. "I think the title conjures up an image of giving evidence, like in a rape case, for example," says Culleton. "That you'll say, she was wearing this, not wearing that, a factual approach. And that's balanced by the potential to read other ideas into the monologues."

That the production achieves a balance of humour and gravity was also important. "I remember a couple of years ago there was an event called 17 Speeches Against Aids," he says, and while it bore an impressive impact, "people were literally counting them down. I didn't want to get into the bleak trap. I wanted to show lots of different concerns, different levels."

Part of this multiplicity of perspective is an openness to the experience of the abuser as well as the abused, a difficult area on which Leah Flynn touches as she discusses Feehily's monologue in the Fishamble rehearsal room. "The people involved in this massacre are scarred psychologically too," she says. "They've seen things . . . little children being killed off . . . And that sort of thing takes a while. And for them, it's almost impossible to accept that guns are not going to come every day. It's difficult for them, the men and the women, to go about their daily business afterwards."

Fittingly, a world in which ordinary life is tinged by the threat, or the memory, of violence at all times is precisely what Handke has created in Self-Accusation. "We didn't want to do a play that was about violence against women," says Fay, and Johnston agrees: "But there are actually terribly violent images within the piece, which can be read into it or not. It is a thought-provoking kind of poetic. It's a play not about the guilty or the innocent, but about wrestling with guilt itself, about why this is going on. I think that's what's interesting about doing this for Amnesty."

Amnesty International's International Women's Day Festival runs from Friday, March 4th to Tuesday, March 8th, and includes readings, conferences and exhibitions as well as theatrical productions, a screening of Joshua Marston's acclaimed film Maria Full of Grace and a concert on Tuesday headlined by Nina Hynes. The keynote address is by Eve Ensler before a production of her Vagina Monologues on Friday at 8pm in SS Michael & John, Temple Bar. She Was Wearing takes place in the same venue on Saturday at 8pm, and Self-Accusation will play there on Sunday at 8.30pm. For tickets and information, call Amnesty (01-6776361)