Uncle Francis' Advice to Writers

 

 Portrait by Lucy Stopford  

 "Take firm hold of a goose. Yank out a feather. Trim it. Whittle the tip. Dip that in ink, and the one thing you'll find you can't do with it is draw a diagonal line. You can't cross out a paragraph with a quill." I remember, if not verbatim, this explanation from my Uncle Francis – complete with actions – for the appearance of two different versions of the same exchange at the end of Love's Labours Lost. I also remember his dissection of Shakespeare's reasons for redrafting it: "One idea, one line: good... One idea, two lines: bad!" 

 I saw him give this class in 1999, in Oxford where he'd invited me to rehearse an installment of his blank-verse epic of Western Culture, Agora. A few months earlier, he'd invited me to a mysterious meeting at the Athenaeum Club - Mum had always said she and his other siblings thought he might be a spy - then he walked me across Pall Mall into the National Gallery, stood me in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait and asked, "How do you fancy playing him?" It was my first paid acting job outside of touring schools.

 

  It was fun. 

  Francis Robert Le Plastrier Warner was an excellent uncle, who lived right up until this Tuesday. He was also possibly one of Theatre's greatest friends. He studied under C. S. Lewis, and taught Ian McKellen. He strolled along the Sein with Samuel Beckett. He strolled with Burton and Taylor. He invited R. Buckminster Fuller – architect of EPCOT's Spaceship Earth, and populariser of domed cities – to design the first ever "black box" theatre, deep beneath St. Peter's College.

 

(source)

 

 This was never built in the end, but the money raised for it became the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust, whose annual award you can still apply for here.

 I'm bad at visiting, and I think the last time I saw him was when he came to see me in Ring at the Cambridge Junction in 2013 (Francis was a Fellow of both Universities). This was David Rosenberg's first binaural collaboration with Glen Neath, taking place in total darkness in front of an audience wearing headphones: "What it reminded me most of, of course," said Francis in the restaurant afterwards, quite out of the blue, "was being interrogated: I was in Egypt. Lucy and Georgie were with me. I'd gone out to look for eggs to scramble, because my daughters wanted scrambled eggs for breakfast, and some men bundled me into a car. In the end the only thing that saved me was that I didn't have a gun on me. Everyone had told me, going out, I should carry a gun. But it saved me. They had to let me go. Never carry a gun." Presumably, then, the Official Secrets Act's thirty years' injunction was finally over. Mum was right. 

 That's Lucy's wonderful portrait of her father at the top of this post. 

 He would always ask what I was writing.