Fired up ... Mel Smith, playing the cigar-
smoking Winston Churchill, is among
performers who intend to defy the ban.
Photograph: William Conran/PA
The Scottish executive's ban on smoking in public places has had an easy ride since it came into force in March. The predictable huffing and puffing (not to mention coughing and spluttering) from the smoking lobby has won little public support and even the pub trade has been sanguine.
Freedom from the stench of stale cigarettes is great, but although drinkers can breathe easy, the executive cannot. There's a challenge to the smoking ban and it's coming to the world's biggest arts festival. That's because, unlike the ban in the Republic of Ireland and from next year in England, this one applies to the stage as much as any other place of work.
The law is clear. No tobacco, no herbal cigarettes or "lit substance" can be smoked on stage without a £50 fine for the culprit and £200 for the venue manager. But when the estimated 16,990 performers show up for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next month, a fair few will be expecting to light up in the name of their art.
Already on record is Mel Smith who, playing Winston Churchill, thinks it's reasonable to smoke "a third of a Romeo & Julietta" cigar during each performance of Allegiance at the Assembly Rooms. Tomek Borkowy, who runs the Hill Street Theatre, grew up in communist Poland and knows all about state censorship, has said his venue will defy the ban. "The freedom to portray reality as it is, and history as it was, is an unquestionable necessity," he writes in an editorial broadside in the Hill Street programme.
Upholders of the ban argue it should be no more beyond the wit of a director to invent a replacement for smoking than to represent drug use, murder or sex on stage. While this may be true for non-realistic forms, it isn't in a play such as Unprotected, a piece of slice-of-life verbatim theatre in which smoking punctuates everything that happens.
The tension of a scene in which a mother describes the gruesome death of her daughter, a murdered prostitute, is ratcheted up ten-fold when she breaks off for the ritual of opening a packet, lighting a fag and inhaling before continuing her tale.
Audiences who see the Liverpool Everyman production at Edinburgh's Traverse can't possibly expect to see the same show.
