Devolution has changed the landscape of British theatre, and London's National Theatre has since been decentred by the hugely successful National Theatre of Scotland and the more recent National Theatre of Wales. It is no surprise that Northern Ireland wants to get in on the action. Yet, while a functioning Assembly helps clarify its position within the United Kingdom, there remain many thorny questions about Northern Ireland's relationship with Irish culture and identity – questions that are all the more vexing after years of conflict. It is for this reason that McNulty describes his study of the Ulster Literary Theatre (ULT) and its position within the cultural nationalist movement as arriving ‘too late’ (p. 223). Indeed, he contends that in its early years this institution presented Ireland with a valuable opportunity to interrogate the concept of a distinctly ‘northern’ identity before the reality of partition.

McNulty's argument is both simple and compelling. He claims that the ULT was intended as a means of promoting ‘fluidic processes of definition, resistance and invention’ within the project of cultural nationalism (p. 7). Chapters one to six outline the ULT's identification as both a northern and a nationalist organization – an argument which is supported by the self-conscious connection between the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society and the United Irishmen, as well as the original incarnation of the ULT as the ‘Ulster Branch of the Irish Literary Theatre’. The overview is soundly researched and competently written. It is not until the final four chapters, however, that McNulty comes into his own with his sophisticated and persuasive analysis of the oeuvre of ULT playwright Gerald MacNamara. The lack of critical attention which MacNamara's work has received to date is partly due to issues surrounding documentation and access; it was not until the late 1980s that his (surviving) plays were methodically collected and published. Nevertheless, McNulty successfully reclaims this writer as a ‘proto-post-nationalist’ and a forerunner of modernist and post-nationalist writers such as Joyce, O'Brien and Beckett (p. 149). His reading of the playwright's use of parody as both a counter- and a co-response to cultural nationalism demonstrates the ULT's potential to reveal the ‘silences and gaps’ in the ruralist construction of Irish identity performed at the Abbey (p. 141). In so highlighting the tensions between the regional and national, McNulty taps into current concerns about recognizing ‘national identities’ as plural and fluid.