Alan Teder's tribute

Harri – the young adult and the actor/performer

"Be yourself... but fabulously."

A young Harri Mürk learned this secret to the art of stage performance through an acting workshop studio during the 1970s. The saying apparently originates with the British dancer/actor & mime artist Lindsay Kemp.

But the words, "Be yourself... but fabulously", could just as well have been the incantation and instruction that the creator & great spirit used when they brought Harri William Murk into the world. As this was exactly how Harri lived his entire life, and it was this fabulous person that we all loved and with whose company we were blessed for the past 54 years.

Harri performed in, wrote and directed countless plays, musical theatre, farces, comedies, dramas, poetry recitals and performance art pieces over the course of his life. In his teens and twenties he was the “go-to” guy if a young romantic lead hero was required in the local Toronto-Estonian community theatre companies of which there were several. The fact that his Estonian was impeccable, his acting gifts were innate and that his physique and clothing sense could cut a dashing figure on the stage, all combined to make him the top casting choice for your production. If you managed to cast Harri in the lead, your play would be guaranteed a success, regardless of whether the other amateurs were up to it. Harri’s example would always raise the bar, so that everyone else in the cast would work to try to rise to his level.

I want to mention two roles especially that will stick in my mind forever. The local playwright Elmar Maripuu had an idea for a comic-book-style musical-comedic farce in the early 1980’s. The hero would lead a secret identity life as a mild-mannered bespectacled librarian, dressed in a bow-tie and v-neck powder blue sweater, a tweed jacket and carrying a briefcase loaded with books. When oppression and danger would threaten the meek and the weak, our hero would transform himself through a nifty costume change into blue, black and white spandex tights and cape and emerge as “Super-Esto”. Can you guess who was born to play this part? Yes, it was our Harri… and actually it wasn’t much of a stretch for him as he just had to play himself… but fabulously! There was a musical dance interlude built-into the piece where all of the several superheroes who were already clad in the appropriate tights and spandex outfits, did an intermission act as the “Kalev Equestrienne”, mimicking the standard rhythmic gymnastics performed by young Estonian teenage girls in the group “Kalev Estienne”. The sight of Harri leading the boys troupe through the routines with balls and hoops is a hysterical memory in my mind. Somehow as they got better at the routine over time, it actually became funnier and funnier.

The other role that I want to mention will be a secret to most of you, as it was not performed on the conventional theatre stage. After a dress-up party at the house of Harri’s dear childhood friend Erika Johanson, several people observed that Harri cut quite a dashing figure in his top hat, tails and tuxedo. There was nothing else for it, except that the performance had to carry on and a limousine was rented and, still in his outfit, Harri travelled through the Toronto night-life of clubs and discos with an entourage of appropriately dressed companions. But Harri’s chosen character for the night was not as a local club-crawler, rather he presented himself as Estonian Royalty, the lost heir to the Estonian throne and he refused to speak a word of English to anyone for the rest of the night until dawn arrived, regardless of the bouncers or barmen’s interrogations or threats he encountered when he demanded free admission or drinks for himself and his party. Fortunately no policemen or other authorities were encountered who could have called the bluff. But there was never anyone who was more qualified to be Estonian Royalty than our Harri.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in his "Poem of the Gifts" said that "When I imagine Heaven, I have always pictured it as a kind of library". Our Harri, Our SuperEsto, our lost Crown Prince of Estonia, our beloved teacher and professor and our dear friend has gone to that eternal library now.

May his spirit have eternal peace.