by Rose Rushe
WORD is out now of the sudden death of Richard Ryan, theatre promoter, and dear friend to Limerick through work with shows in Moyross, Southill, No. 69, Friar’s Gate and Millennium Theatre.
He brought international brilliance to our door for a fiver. That was the sort of thing that he made happen and often: Des Keogh, who brought the house down; The Godot Theatre, Little Gem by Gúna Nua, Dear Frankie by Five Lamps, Argentina’s La Compania for Happy Days. There were more.
Richard’s vision was bold and mighty. He riz me out of the chair once with his snorting, bellowed retort to the idea that Kenneth Branagh was too big a name mooted for the Prof in his upcoming (?) Educating Rita with Lyric Theatre: “NOTHING is impossible. EVERYTHING can happen”.
In connecting with people, be you a star or this minion, he was immediate, intense, a profoundly interested and enveloping mass who thought nothing of (w)ringing the phone out. No sadness went unseen, no occasion passed without a terrific bash.
Richard Ryan RIP died of natural causes while touring with the play ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ in Wales on Monday May 4. This New Theatre project was one of several about which he was all fired up, his 2015 to be a series of light-filled hits and wonder. I previewed it for Limerick in Siamsa Tíre last year with him and for sure, it filled his criteria and craving for intellectual excitement, visual power and that lingering push to puzzle and mull over that which moves us, displaces the obvious and oblivous.
Enough guff. This poem ‘Love’ from City of Culture’s anthology Dream of a City is by Maeve Kelly, who knows something of bereavement. I post it as a song for Richard’s sole sibling Neil, a man torn already by the loss of his love, Rita. I know what Maeve wrote below reflects Richard’s approach to Neil in that sorrow, and may we borrow from her tenderness.
Love
For us you changed the colour of the sky/ illumined with saffron and rose/ the greyest day, and when/ garden petals folded and closed/ and when the weeds on paths were hoed/ and piled in heaps to be carried away/ we lit ceremonial fires of praise/ locked doors and gates/ and brought love inside.
Astrolabe Press 2014
