"(I wrote this five years ago, as a gift to Francis on his 80th birthday. Following the news of his passing last week, it feels like deserves a wider audience, with just a very sad change of tense...)
Every month as I sat down to write about another classic product, a wave of guilt swept across me: I was the wrong man for the job. There was someone out me who could write better, light better and, for good measure, lived through more of the products that are now classics (and many, many less good ones besides!) Maybe Classic Gear would have been better in the hands of Francis Reid. Or maybe that age, that experience means something different: that we should actually have considered Francis himself a classic!
The qualifications? Well, there were the shows, of course: he lit more than three hundred of them, including such West End hits as Grease, Joseph, Man of La Mancha plus more than sixty pantomimes; Francis was a student of theatre around the world yet he still loved a good panto partly for the challenge of getting the show on, partly for the bonus pay-cheque just before Christmas (ever pragmatic!), but mainly for wanting to get right the show that might be a child's first ever experience of live theatre.
Alongside that, he spent the 60s as resident lighting director at Glyndebourne, lighting their productions while also working with Strand to create an innovative new control system that let him sit in the stalls and play his own lighting.
He never limited himself to lighting, though, preferring to be a jack of all trades. His interest in every aspect of theatre even took him beyond the stage, the period from 1979-1981 seeing him take charge of the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmonds.
More importantly, he was a compulsive communicator, always wanting to share what he knew with the world. He became editor of another classic, Strand's legendary Tabs magazine, in 1974 and wrote for most of the technical publications around the world. He's wrote books not just about lighting but also design, theatre administration and more - the ABCs of Stage Technology and Stage Lighting (full disclosure...) both an inspiration and now a reference for this column. And he taught lucky students around the world - at Central, RADA, in Canada and at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, where he was made a fellow with a great title - I think it's 'theatre technologist' - that I am hugely envious of.
His skill was always been to provide a deep insight in an accessible, easy-to-read, friendly way. I think this was because of his enquiring mind that - as those who enjoyed his regular questioning of speakers at Showlight and elsewhere will know - tended not to let go until he had an answer that satisfied him. Perhaps that's the holdover of his science degree?
That urge to communicate remained unabated to the end, recording the history he lived through for posterity and the process of stepping away from lighting that we'll all eventually live through. Sadly, unless there's a draft hidden away somewhere, we will now not see a book called Living The Showbiz Life expanding on his sage advice about staying married ("marry a stage manager, they expect rehearsals to over-run and you to be late for meals") since that's the hardest part of the business and he did that, too, incredibly well; our thoughts are with Jo, who survives him.
We've all learnt from you Francis. Thanks for sharing so freely, and so well."
(Rob Halliday)
