Smoking on stage: why theatre needs to kick the habit

They're smelly, distracting and overloaded with dramatic 'significance'. Isn't it time theatre gave up its addiction to cigarettes?
Laura Rees and Will Young in Noel Coward's The Vortex
What a drag ... Laura Rees puffs on an (artistically justified) cigarette in Noël Coward's The Vortex, opposite Will Young, in a 2007 production at Manchester's Royal Exchange. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

What should theatre's New Year resolution be? Ought it, as Lyn Gardner demands, shed the excess weight, develop a new skill set and get more involved in the community? Or should it aim to increase enjoyment of life and time spent with the family, as John Barrowman might prefer? If the choice were mine, I'd pick that old-fashioned gem: quitting smoking.
I'm serious. I would outlaw cigarettes on the stage. Not, I should add, for the sake of our health – it's hard to get wound up about the risks of a solitary cigarette smoked in an air-conditioned auditorium, even for actors who are doing it night after night (and plenty of thesps aren't averse to the odd puff, in any case). Something else is the problem: theatre shouldn't smoke because, well, it doesn't do it very well.

In film, smoking looks great. Writing at the time of the smoking ban's inception, Lynn Barber wrote about "the great black-and-white smoking films of the 1940s – Casablanca, Now, Voyager, The Big Sleep – where wreaths of smoke are an essential and beautiful part of the cinematography, and where smoking clearly stands for sex". By comparison, when theatre smokes, it ends up looking like a schoolboy behind the bikeshed, coughing, spluttering and lighting the wrong end.
Where film presents only an image of the cigarette, theatre must handle the actual object, unedited and undistorted. On screen, we see beautiful curls, wisps, plumes and jets, which add texture and shade to the image. But theatre, as Alan Read has explained beautifully, happens in the air between performers and audience. That air moves, vibrates, contains waves of light and breath. Here smoke is not only seen, but smelt.

A real cigarette lit on stage will put any smokers in the auditorium on nicotine alert. If the cigarettes are fake or herbal, the ghastly, faintly fishy smell instantly undermines the fiction. In either case, a cigarette makes the audience remember itself.
There is no such thing as an innocent cigarette on stage. First, because such a thing is now banned by a law that proscribes onstage smoking unless artistically justifiable. But then, all theatrical cigarettes have their dramatic significance. It is a cigarette, rather than circumstance, that enables Martha to run a hand up Nick's groin in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and in The Seagull, it's Masha's snuff habit that indicates her dismal unhappiness. And how else would a director convey the period for any Noël Coward play?
But it must be more than just a cigarette. Where real people smoke to satisfy cravings, or to kill time waiting for something else to happen, characters have no such luxury: they do so in order that a playwright, director or actor might reveal something about them. What difference does it make if one or other of Spooner and Hirst are a smoker in Pinter's No Man's Land?
Yet, even as a sign, the cigarette is both hackneyed and clumsy. Smokers in drama are generally unhappy and weak-willed; they are shadowy and unsympathetic figures, who turn to their crutch as a display of anger or nerves. Or else they are sexual predators, reckless types that grasp the present before they plan for the future. Surely there are savvier, subtler ways to convey such information? It's time we extinguished the habit.

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