The women who became Queen Kong, Mrs Freud and the Kray sisters are back with a new show. Iseult Golden and Carmel Stephens talk to Susan Conley about roles for women and founding Inis Theatre.

It is a fairly common post-drama school dream: practitioners get together to start their own company, determined to make their mark - their way. Inspired by the continuing successes of independent companies such as Bedrock, Rough Magic and The Passion Machine, a group of young ones will forge ahead, hire out a venue, produce posters and programmes, maybe get into the Fringe Festival . . . until attrition, ennui and the sheer force of will it takes to keep things going takes it toll. The actors go off to try to break into film; the directors and designers go freelance. Another one bites the dust.

When Iseult Golden and Carmel Stephens talked about starting their own theatre company, it was for "all the typical reasons," says Golden, having to do mainly with being women in a world in which the good roles go to the guys. If their approach to the enterprise had a difference, it was all down to the work. "We found work that we thought was an absolute gem, and the work was more where our heads were, rather than 'We're setting up a company'," says Stephens. "We didn't actually realise what we were doing until we'd done it." What they did was found Inis Theatre, and begin what promises to be a fruitful venture. Together with director David Horan, the women produced The World's Wife, a series of poems by Carol Ann Duffy that imagine the lives of the wives of famous men. In Queen Kong, Mrs Freud and the Kray Sisters, Golden and Stephens created physically precise, emotionally embodied characterisations that were both moving and hilarious. Horan's creative direction made the most of the women's individual gifts, and Inis Theatre was in the pool with a splash.

All three work within the established professional sector as well, with Stephens and Golden acting with companies as diverse as The Ark and Iomha Ildanach, and Horan assisting directors such as Alan Stanford, Ben Barnes and Stephen Rea.

Their latest collaboration, To Kill a Dead Man, opens tonight in Project, and is the last in their trilogy of adaptations. Their second outing, Lady Susan, found the company expanding their devising skills as they strove to bring Jane Austen's work (which was unpublished in her lifetime) to life on the stage.

"We had this routine when we were adapting it: we would improvise in the morning and write in the afternoon, and we were on that kind of a schedule because we really hadn't left enough time for the project," says Golden. Such an intensely collaborative way of working makes one wonder if the row-quotient during rehearsals was extraordinarily high, but watching the three negotiate the question is the answer in itself - each voiced their opinion in turn, each listened fully while the other spoke, and there were fair doses of laughter during the entire interview.

Things changed a bit for the latest production. "On To Kill a Dead Man, we had a writer - Kevin McGee," explains Horan. "The improvs happened but the writer did go home, having seen the improvs and having seen different ideas for the scene - and writers can see theatrically sometimes things that we can't see. And as a result of deadlines, we didn't have time to get cross with each other. There have been one or two fraught moments, but not very fraught.

"I think that in this process there's been more negotiation. We'd do an improv and we'd be going away thinking about what we wanted and what we did, and Kevin would go away and write the thing - and then of course they're going to diverge. So there'd be lots of talking about character and plotlines in a way that didn't happen before."

This time out, the company is drawing from the movies and had a much larger frame of reference. Described as "detective thriller meets the monster movie", the two actors will once again play all the parts. However, the group has pushed its limits in this case by creating a two-act play. This challenged the players to work towards greater depth of characterisation and motivation.

"If you're going to go for a two-act play," says Horan, "there's the whole extra responsibility towards your audience, your idea has to develop and deepen, and has to be bigger to start off with."

"It's particularly empowering for the actors," says Horan.

"Very much so," agrees Stephens. "And particularly with this show - Iseult and I have two main characters that we're both invested in as actors. We love these two women, and have nurtured them from the beginning, so it's very important to us what happens to them on the stage. We have been able to argue for them, and that's great, because obviously in the more mainstream theatre, you don't have that opportunity."

Last year, the group worked more on than off; Horan reckons it to have been almost 25 weeks' worth of work. While that much "togetherness" may not be on the cards for 2003, Golden is always aware of a little worry in the back of her mind. "A fear with a collective that works together in a very concentrated period of time is that we've gotten so unobjective that we've got loads of in-jokes. We think it's brilliant, and we're not really sure how it's playing because it's become so familiar."

"And to try to guard against that," says Horan, "we've had staged readings, scripts in hand, with an outside audience, on three separate occasions throughout this process."

"I don't think that's happened yet, where we're too subjective," muses Stephens. "I think we're too aware of our baby status. This is only show number three." As far as show number four is concerned, it's being written for the company by a Texas-based playwright, and it will signal the end of the Golden/Stephens "two-handers" - for the time being. To date, Inis Theatre has presented more than 150 performances, had two nationwide tours and worked in 40 theatres - all without any outside funding. "The company have been so lucky because it's been us three from the beginning," says Horan. All nod in agreement; no matter how many others Inis bring on board, their core will always be their biggest asset.

• To Kill a Dead Man runs from tonight until February 21st at the Project Cube, Dublin