More than 1,000 people gathered in the Exam Hall in Trinity College Dublin yesterday afternoon to attend a memorial service for Rupert Murray, one of Ireland's foremost lighting designers and producers, who died last week.
A large image of a widely smiling Murray with his trademark long and tousled hair looked down over the ever- growing crowd of mourners from the world of arts and culture who came to stand literally shoulder to shoulder with each other to say farewell.
Murray had known he was dying for several months, and he had planned his memorial service carefully, wishing it to be as inclusive of his personal and public life as possible.
The chief mourners were his wife, Sheelagh, daughter Rachel, and his parents Hugh and Monica.
Julian Erskine, a theatre producer and a close friend, told the congregation that Murray had asked himself and Michael Colgan, the director of the Gate Theatre, to put together the service.
"We have worked and played together with Rupert, and now we come together to praise and admire, to laugh and cry," Erskine said, before he introduced each of the speakers and performers for the service.
Colgan described Murray as "the best arts organiser this country has ever had" who had "not one inch of arrogance or conceit".
He recalled his first meeting with him more than 30 years ago, when Murray looked like "a Californian rock star, with a suede jacket, that wonderful hair - and his vegetarianism. The personification of cool."
Lynne Parker, director of Rough Magic Theatre Company, told how Murray's last of many directorships to a board was to Rough Magic - a role he took up with generosity even though he was already ill.
She spoke of how he had once magicked simple kitchen foil into stars for a production of The Drunkard which had had a tiny budget. "Rupert had the capacity to use everything creatively."
Actor Stephen Brennan said: "Rupert was a sculptor of light and he created the limelight for us, a limelight he never wanted to step into himself."
Brennan also read a poem which he had written on hearing of Murray's death:
Doubt not they chorus with me now,
Our players, painters, pipers, writers,
Music makers all,
And sing the blessings of your gentle light.
Musician Bisi Adigun sang and drummed two Nigerian songs of farewell. Actor Alan Stanford read the Shakespeare poem, Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun.
Writer Vincent Woods read Wordsworth's poem, Surprised by Joy. There was a recording of a Tom Waits song, Come On Up to My House, and uileann piper Declan Masterson played the lament Caoineadh Cú Chulainn.
Rachel, Rupert and Sheelagh Murray's only child, spoke last. Of all the hundreds assembled there in her father's memory, she was the only one who had known him as "my wonderful dad".
Her moving tribute commanded utter silence in the crowded hall. She told the congregation that she had always asked her father what his favourite Bob Dylan song was, but he had never told her.
In the end, his family chose one for him. It was A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall and it played the mourners out.
