For those who haven't succumbed to Friel fatigue, the academic strand of the current Friel Festival takes place this weekend, when his work will be examined at a two-day conference at Newman House, Dublin. Declan Kiberd, Katherine Worth, Richard Pine, Christopher Murray, Cathy Leeney, Shaun Richards, Anna McMullan and Redmond O'Hanlon are the speakers. Attendance is free and booking is advisable from the organiser, Tony Roche at UCD's English Department: 01-7068323.

Tomorrow evening at the Abbey Theatre, Seamus Deane will launch a special edition of Irish University Review devoted to Friel, intended to be, as UCD's Tony Roche writes in the introduction, "a stocktaking at a key juncture" of the playwright's continuing career, rather than a summation. The review includes some very fine academic essays, especially Nicholas Grene's "Friel and Transparency", and Anna McMullan's "Gender, Authority and the Body in Dancing At Lughnasa", but what lingers longest is the contribution of the playwrights, Tom Kilroy and Frank McGuinness. McGuinness writes a delicately illuminating commentary on Faith Healer, which concludes passionately: "not since Rashomon has a work of art concerned itself so deeply with the convolutions of narrative juxtapositions. Not since The Glass Me- nagerie has a play investigated the creative powers of memory. Faith Healer is Friel's masterwork." All the more reason to lament its omission from this haphazardly programmed Festival.