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The signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was a watershed moment in Irish culture, as much as in the political sphere. Up until that moment, late twentieth-century Irish history had been dominated by the conflict that erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, and Northern Irish theatre was dominated by the ‘Troubles play’—initially in the 1960s in the work of Sam Thompson, and later in plays by writers such as John Boyd, Graham Reid, and, in more complex ways, behind the formally adventurous work of Stewart Parker and Anne Devlin. However, since 1998, writers such as Owen McCafferty have inaugurated the search for a theatrical form appropriate to a post-conflict culture in which scars and divisions still remained. This chapter covers the arc of development of Northern drama over the period, leading up to some of the innovative performances of companies such as Theatre of Witness.

The article examines the metatheatricality of Gerald MacNamara's The Mist That Does Be on the Bog (1909) and Marie Jones's Stones in His Pockets (1990) in terms of their respective critiques of the cultural politics of nationalism and globalization during the periods of the Irish Revival and the Celtic Tiger. MacNamara's satirical restaging of the theatrical conventions of the early Abbey Theatre and his rejection of the national theatre's "authentic" (re)production of the wild west of Ireland precociously anticipates the postmodern cultural politics of contemporary Celtic Tiger Ireland as described by Colin Graham, whereby essence or authenticity are constantly interrogated and consistently ironized. This essay argues that the deconstructive power of Mist's metatheatrical critique of the Revival and the Abbey Theatre continues to resonate, even in (post) Celtic Tiger Ireland, as the politics and performance of authenticity remain imbricated within the aesthetics and ideology of theatre, tourism, cinema, and culture, as well as in the history and heritage industries, and their collective (re)presentations of Ireland, as satirized in Jones's commercially successfully though critically neglected play, Stones in His Pockets . Drawing on various critiques of the notion of "authenticity" posited by Graham, David Lloyd, Frantz Fanon, and Declan Kiberd, this essay examines how the very concept of "authenticity" is consistently ironized and undermined in both plays, as each dismantles dominant constructions of national identity that have emerged diachronically during both the colonial and postcolonial periods.