Radio: Jenny Gilbert listens to women on war

War is a boy thing, isn't it? If men were more like women, wars wouldn't start in the first place. It's a simplistic diagnosis, and one that is neither fully supported nor wholly disproved by the three specially commissioned plays by women writers that make up War Zone (Drama on 3, today at 6.30pm, R3). Making their debut on British radio are writers from Germany, Algeria and Croatia, each of whom takes war as her theme and precedes her work with a personal introduction, setting each conflict in context. The result is a collage of responses from an exclusively female perspective that, perhaps inevitably, offers more questions than answers.

Algeria's struggle for independence is the backdrop for Fatima Gallaire's play, Pebbles For Your Thirst, set in a mysterious prison in the Sahara. The prison is seemingly luxurious and its inmates are not locked in, yet the landscape that surrounds it makes any attempt at escape futile.

Screaming Butterflies, by the Croatian Asja Srnec Todorovic, is an allegory of adult confrontation made more shocking by being performed by children. Zoki, Tomo and Luka snake out at night to spy on the the "Big Man", the bogeyman their parents have warned them about. But when Luka and Tomo realise that the Big Man is in fact a member of Zoki's tribe, they decide to take drastic action.

In a very different dramatic style, Splinters, by Germany's Dea Loher, challenges listeners' notions of what war is really like for both soldier and civilian. It's an abstract piece - a montage of voices and experiences interwoven with music by Caspar Brotzmann, a leading composer of the German avant-garde. n

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