"THIS WEEK, we're on GMT - Glenties Mean Time," joked Joe Mulholland, director of the MacGill summer school yesterday, when the rehearsed reading of Living Quarters ran late.
For Mulholland, securing the three theatre companies, Ouroboros, Manchester Library Theatre Company and the Silken Thomas Players, was integral to the success of putting together this year's programme.
"You can't put on a school in tribute to a playwright without performing some of [ his] plays," he points out. Running all this week alongside the lectures on Brian Friel's work, and screenings of films and documentaries, are several performances and rehearsed readings of his plays.
Between them, the three companies will have given seven performances and six rehearsed readings by the end of this week. Yesterday's reading was of Living Quarters, and the evening show was Faith Healer.
Geoff Gould, director of the Cork-based Blood in the Alley theatre company, directed all six of the rehearsed readings, as well as the performance of Making History on opening night.
"Friel's work is like a Mozart score," he said. "To do six play readings in six days in the place where many of them are set is an incredible experience for me and the actors: something we will remember for the rest of our lives."
"I've directed four of Friel's plays in the past," said Roger Haines, director of Manchester Library Theatre Company, who performed Faith Healer last night.
"To have the playwright himself sitting in the audience watching, someone you've previously only known through directing his work, is frightening and exciting."
Patrick Burke of St Patrick's College spoke on the theme of Family and Ballybeg. Referring to Friel as "one of the great world dramatists", he told the audience that the playwright has spoken "of the family as 'necessary to the life' but also 'as an area of alienation'." Not, he stressed, Friel's own family, but those troubled families whose lives he explores in plays such as Dancing at Lughnasa, Aristocrats, and Philadelphia, Here I Come!
Family has proved a consistent theme during this school. One of the most memorable talks was on Tuesday, when writer and critic Richard Pine told the story of the genesis of Dancing at Lughnasa.
"Tom [ Kilroy, the playwright] and Brian had been to a show at the National Theatre in London in the 1980s, and, walking to the restaurant, Brian started talking about two of his aunts from Donegal, whom he had gone to London to look for and found ill," he said.
It was Thatcher's era, and hearing an Irish accent among the people living in cardboard city near the Embankment prompted Friel's story. "By the time they got to the restaurant, Tom had told him he had to write a play."
Even allowing for the week that's in it, you are never very far from some Brian Friel connection in Glenties. For instance, take Room 3 of the Highlands Hotel. There is a plaque outside the door announcing Meryl Streep slept there on September 24th, 1998, the night of the local premiere of the film version of Dancing at Lughnasa in which she starred.
All week, people have been venturing out with umbrellas to walk some distance out of town on the Portnoo Road, past rain-washed fields and pennants of bright foxgloves, to look at The Laurels, a simple farmhouse that was Friel's ancestral home. This is the house where his five aunts lived, two of whom he went to find in London when they had fallen through the cracks of an unforgiving society. The now-famous house where the "five brave Glenties women" of the dedication in Dancing at Lughnasa lived their complex, troubled and honest lives.
Translations, performed by Ouroboros Theatre Company, begins a three-night run tonight. The school finishes on Sunday.