In Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone, a Belfast Catholic woman is harassed for moving into the 'neutral,' university area of town. Her socialist roommate, however, does not believe she is being victimised until a brick flies through the window of their flat. In Christina Reid’s The Belle of Belfast City, a carefree woman exacts a joking revenge on her Protestant, ultra-loyalist brother by serving him 'Republican' sausages she had smuggled out of the Republic of Ireland. A Belfast Protestant man in Marie Jones’s A Night in November overcomes his sectarian anger as he cheers for the Irish team in the 1994 World Cup with Irish people from the Republic and the USA in a New York sports bar. These three instances from contemporary Northern Irish drama reflect one of the constant dilemmas facing people in Northern Ireland: the negotiation of identity in a region crossed and recrossed by a web of geographical, religious, cultural, economic, and political fault-lines. With the range of national identities co-existing in Northern Ireland’s borders, each person in Northern Ireland finds her

himself on shifting political and cultural sands, negotiating her

his own identity through relationships both within and without that area’s borders.

For Northern Irish writers, writing in the interstice between Eire and the UK, and finding their work influenced by both British and Irish cultural traditions and politics, the notion of national identity becomes complex indeed. Many Northern Irish playwrights have received funding from the Arts Councils both in Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland, and their works are regularly anthologised and critiqued as Irish, rather than British, dramas. Since many Northern Irish writers are generally considered (and consider themselves) part of an Irish cultural tradition, discussing Northern Irish women playwrights in an anthology of British rather than Irish writing is a problematic, and even volatile, endeavour.