system" put on new plays that might bring people together. Roddy was one of the co-artistic directors of the company. The Tinderbox company came to be in the 1990s and 2000s one of the leading theater companies in Belfast. Roddy's performances in Belfast attracted attention of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and he played roles in the RSC's productions of Billy Roche’s Amphibians and James Robson’s King Baby. In 1998, he played with the RSC for a full season at the company's home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Roddy starred in two plays with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, namely Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and In a Little World of Our Own. For the latter play, he won ESB/Irish Times Award for best supporting actor. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme with its sympathetic portrayal of Protestant Ulstermen serving in the British Army in World War I, the leader of whom is a repressed homosexual, was described as a "landmark" play in Dublin, and Roddy's performance in the play did much to enhance his reputation. In a Little World of Our Own whose subject were Ulster Unionists involved in a paramilitary group was described an important production. Roddy noted that Gary Mitchell, the playwright who wrote In a Little World of Our Own was Protestant while Frank McGuinness, the playwright who wrote Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme was a Catholic, saying "Gary and Stuart are coming from different perspectives of course but very similar voices in a way. Neither of them are afraid to be critical of their ‘sides'". In 2004, he was nominated in the ESB/Irish Times Theatre Awards for best actor for his performance in The Weir. In 2004 and again in 2014, he acted in the controversial play Defender of the Faith by Stuart Carolan, set in 1986 on an isolated farm in County Armagh, where a family that supports the Provisional Irish Republican Army suspects that one of them might be an informer for the Crown. Roddy recalled about the premiere of Defender of the Faith: "At that time the shit was hitting the fan with how many high-ranking IRA people were actually informers. It was a really contentious issue at the time and it left everyone in Northern Ireland very uncertain. It was a paranoid time, that period raised a lot of unanswered questions and the