Stage struck

PETER CRAWLEYlooks at onstage smoking habits

IN BELFAST last week, a teenage boy and a middle-aged woman abruptly decided to give up smoking. They didn't really have a choice. The show was Vincent River, a tense two-hander by Philip Ridley, in which a bereaved East London mother puffs her way through a small tobacco plantation while the boy who discovered her dead son eventually produces a joint to salve their wounds. But in Prime Cuts' production, the actors never lit a single combustible, sucking air through unsmouldering props instead. It's one way of quitting.

The three-year-old smoking ban in Northern Ireland bars cigarettes from the workplace, of course, but unlike the law in the Republic, it also bans the smoking of "any other substance". So, no herbal cigarettes, no rolled-up filter paper, and, presumably, no varieties of fish or cheese. When theatres in the North pointed out that almost every play in the Irish canon had been rendered unstageable, the law was eventually relaxed. The idea of The Playboy of the Western Worldwith nicotine patches may have been too much to bear.

But that amendment was later rescinded by Northern Ireland’s health minister, and so onstage smoking has had the same stop-start struggle as an addict in the throes of giving up. The problem for drama is that – like them or loathe them – cigarettes, pipes, cigars and joints actually mean something.

Some plays have managed to cut down. When Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doorsopened in the Olympia in 2004, on the first day of the Irish smoking ban, the chain-smoking Paula Spencer engineered ways to never successfully light a cigarette. The great Brian Friel even rewrote two scenes of Dancing at Lughnasato allow Belfast's Lyric Theatre to stage his work three years ago. Vincent River began with an announcement that apologised if "the artistic integrity has been compromised by not smoking".

There's no smoke without ire, though, as Vincent Rivermay now find, having moved to Dublin's Project Arts Centre this week, where it can spark up herbal cigarettes. No one quite knows why a combination of rose petals, marshmallow leaves, red clover, honey and apple juice, once ignited, should smell only slightly worse than Satan's gym bag.

Is this a no-win for naturalistic theatre? When Nora lights a terminally ill Dr Rank's cigar in A Doll's House,for instance, that symbolic weight can't be carried by a cup of tea. But when Jack and Nora share cigarettes in The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey, or the Loman brothers flare up in Death of a Salesman at the Gate, those acrid fumes cut through the fiction like a bad accent.

Representing smoking has now become as difficult as depicting sex or fatal sword fights. But people such as the Abbey’s prop-maker, Eimer Murphy, have found some ingenious solutions, manufacturing fake cigars that depend on the performers and audiences to complete the illusion.

Like relinquishing a dependency on real cigarettes, you need to take it one step at a time. But together we can break the habit.