Dermot Bolger

The play I've written, Consenting Adults (directed by Jim Culleton), is set at a crossing point in the lives of two people. Writing about the millennium was a starting point for me to write about issues of continuity - such as the art of the new world and who is left behind My two characters (played by Brid Ni Neachtain and Barry Barnes) meet in a hotel bedroom for sex, having responded to a classified ad. The play unfolds in a series of physical and mental games, and the audience is never sure what is honesty and what is fantasy. It is about the sexual impulse that causes outwardly successful people with mundane lives to take crazy risks.

Writing this one-act play was a chance to produce a 35-minute piece with a sharp impact. A shorter play moves right in, while a conventional one takes a long time just to set the scene. In the early days of the Abbey, there was always a one-act play as a curtain-raiser. Nowadays, it is hard to get one-act plays performed - unless of course you are Beckett - yet a oneact play can be very successful. In High Germany, which I wrote in 1990, has been performed 35 times in 12 countries. There is also real demand for new Irish one-act plays on the amateur drama circuit.

Jennifer Johnston

MY play, Moonlight and Music, is about a schoolteacher who's been sacked because she has a drink problem. It's a monologue, directed by Caroline Fitzgerald and performed by Catherine Byrne. I normally write fiction, and the fascinating thing about writing for the stage is that your actress brings another dimension to the character and it just takes off. This character drinks, dances, sings, goes back into her childhood - to tell us, in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, why this has happened to her. It's funny, although it's not a funny story. She is a passionate teacher who loves watching the minds of her children opening up, and she has lost her job.

When I was asked to write the play, this lady came singing into my head. I forgot all about the millennium. I had to go back and drag it kicking and screaming into the play! I put in a few lines about the millennium being another area of passing time.

The millennium itself was not such a big thing - the Queen was obviously pretty unhappy, out on the Thames in her boat - and the rest of us just got on and did domestic things. I don't like New Year's Eve anyway. I don't like being told I should be happy. What is there to be happy about time passing? Speaking of which, I'm a bit birthdayed out at the moment because I've just turned seventy. Age has never been a hang-up. I'm rather proud to have got here, to still be working, and not have a blue rinse.

Gavin Kostick

I spent a lot of wasted time in the 1970s playing computer games. If I'd been playing football I might have ended up as David Beckham! So when Jim Culleton of Fishamble asked me to write a play about the millennium, I thought of some of the famous people at the end of the century, and I came up with Lara Croft, the heroine of a computer game called Tomb Raider. There are other characters like Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon, and games like Doom and Quake.

I'm always on for a challenge, so my play, Doom Raider, which I'm also directing, involves bringing a computer-generated graphic to life. If you were someone whose life revolved around death and destruction - like James Bond - what would your interior life be like? Imagine, your only respite is when the computer game is over. I wanted to bring to life that faintly ludicrous world. I've always liked the idea of theatre as a journey into another world, historical or otherwise.

My heroine is not Lara Croft, but she is a computer graphic, played by Fiona Browne. She had to get very fit for the part, and her movement is being choreographed by James Hosty.

I felt that this project was the right thing to do. Someone had to grasp the nettle and Jim was right to come up with the idea. It is the millennium and I've seen a failure to address it. People are either dispirited or else saying "wowee". The organised celebrations weren't very spontaneous. You can't tell people to be excited. Anyway all that competitive stuff about "we have more fireworks than you" between nations was only for one night. The reality is that 2000 is a cuspal year, a bridge into the millennium, which for me, as a kid, was the limit of my imagination. I haven't settled into the idea that it's real.

Deirdre Hines

DREAM Frame (directed by Jo Mangan) has three characters: Two homeless women who live in a playground, and the disembodied voice of the Rapporteur . It is influenced by two poems: Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, and What if this Present Were the World's Last Night by John Donne. The Rapporteur intersperses commentary between what the two women are saying, reflecting the contrast between how we see time in our culture, and how these disenfranchised women view it.

The millennium gave rise to a plethora of talk about the Apocalypse. After a lot of reading and thinking I came to the conclusion that people who believe in the Apocalypse believe in a magical configuration that will stop time. They believe in a vision of the end, whereas my two homeless women have hope in the uncertainty of the future.

I'm a community youth worker in Letterkenny working with Travellers and the homeless and a lot of these people have inspired me to look at the structures which underpin our society, to put characters centre stage who would not normally be there. I'm also interested in looking at how time affects characters, and how deep the human determination is to go on in spite of what happens.

Gina Moxley

MY play, Tea Set (directed by Noeleen Kavanagh), is about an unlikely friendship between two women. Being given a theme didn't thwart me at all: It was a device to hang something on. The theme of the millennium is so wide, you could write anything. We did have certain limitations: a simple set, and a maximum of three characters. There was never more than a slim likelihood that we'd end up writing the same thing - we're all very different.

My play begins with the story of an elderly woman who has suffered a burglary and a rape. She has moved in with her daughter, but the daughter had already booked a holiday between Stephen's Day and New Year's Day. The daughter pays a young woman two grand to granny-sit during the week she is away. The older woman doesn't want to enter the new year - and is actually contemplating suicide - after everything she has been through. She is surprised by the friendship that develops between herself and the young woman who is minding her.

There is only one performer in my play, Pauline Hutton, who has such a fantastically honest and clear face, it's like you can see everything that's going on in her head. While I was writing it last year I was performing a one-woman show myself - The Mistress of Silence, with Meridian Theatre Company - a peculiarly interesting experience. A one-woman show is a scary thing to do, but great - a bit like bungee-jumping.

Nicholas Kelly

WHEN Jim Culleton first asked me to write a play about the millennium, I was quite amenable to the idea. I had been reading a lot of bunkum about religious prophecies - apocalyptic myths about the end of the world. I came up with a monologue about a man (played by Eamon Hunt) in an institution who is very concerned about all these ideas, and what the millennium means. He's a priest.

Writing a play is like randomly casting a hook into the water. I'm more comfortable doing a commission - I did one for Dublin Youth Theatre and I'm now working on one for TEAM - it gives you a sense of self-respect. There's a script editor and a deadline, and I tend to have a poor ability to finish things. I'm happy to get the work in my profession - I'm 27 and not part of any scene.

The Great Jubilee (directed by Brid O Gallchoir) is a black comedy. The character is telling his story and it isn't theatrically ambitious. I wrote it in three drafts. The only area of negotiation between myself and Jim has been the balance between the information included - dates and suchlike - and the character's emotional state.

Programme One, which features the plays by Johnston, Kostick and Kelly, opens on February 7th at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght and moves to the Dublin Castle Crypt on February 14th. Programme Two, which features the plays by Bolger, Moxley and Hines, opens on February 14th at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght and moves to the City Arts Centre in Dublin on February 21st