As the mourners stood in silence and the casket began to move with awesome inevitability towards the steel gates isolating the crematorium furnace, there was a clang and it stopped abruptly. After a wait, and unseen operations, the gates re-opened. This time there was no impediment, and Peter Hall’s mortal remains disappeared into the red glare beyond. There was something symbolic about the incident, a fortuitous summing up of a life, in the mechanical failure at the North Sydney Crematorium. The incident suggested so much about Peter Hall that was left unsaid in the tearful tributes about the devastation of…