ALL THIS week, Brian Friel, who will be 80 in January, can be seen walking around Glenties with his distinctive silver-topped cane.
He has attended many of the week's lectures, films and performances of his plays, a consistent presence each day in his habitual seat mid-way up the left-hand bank of seats in the ballroom of the Highlands Hotel.
In the evenings, he can be found in the hotel's bar, surrounded by a gregarious crowd of family and friends, graciously acknowledging the many visitors to the school who approach nightly to shake his hand or offer their congratulations. Every now and then, he slips outside for a smoke, and he'll chat to his fellow smokers too. He's a great one for the talk.
However, like the dual personalities of one of his most famous characters, Gar O'Donnell in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, there are two Brian Friels, the public playwright and the private man.
In his stage directions for that play, Friel writes: "Public Gar is the Gar that people see, talk to, talk about. Private Gar is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id."
The private Friel, "the man within" does not give interviews. Yesterday though, mid-way through the week-long summer school which has as its theme his life and work, he did agree to talk briefly to The Irish Times.
"I have a strange response to it," he offers, when asked what this week means to him. "I have a sense of some kind of line being drawn, a kind of resolution. It's very gratifying, but I have a sense of nostalgia about it too - all these reminiscences that people are having about my life. Glenties is a place with a very warm atmosphere and it was the right place to have this week, which Joe [Mulholland, the school's director] has put so much work into making it all possible."
Given that Friel is so private, was it difficult for him to agree to be the subject of such a public event, held in his own locality?
He doesn't hesitate for a second. "Yes. Yes, it was." He considers. "But you acquire the ability to detach yourself, and then it becomes almost impersonal. In a way, going in to hear those lectures, it's almost like hearing people talk about someone else. And I find now, I've gone to a lot more of the talks than I thought I would."
Explaining why he has not given an in-depth interview to anyone in many years, Friel said simply: "The whole act of writing is intensely private and it can't be accompanied by self-promotion. I think interviews contaminate the necessary privacy a writer needs. That sounds almost priggish, but for me, it's the truth."