Warning: Smoking can seriously damage your fiction

I have two habits: smoking and theatre-going. Like a persistent framing device, a hasty cigarette will immediately precede and follow any performance I attend. Indeed, I spend at least half of a twenty minute interval weighing up the practical and ethical considerations of squeezing in a second. And I know I’m not the only one.

The thing is that the two inevitably conflict. The smoking habit consists of a ticking necessity, a gradually increasing itch that must be scratched. Most performances, having a certain fixed duration, prove an obstacle to satisfying that craving. Sadly, as with a long-haul flight, to step outside of a performance is to bid a world farewell.

However, in the murky depths of a good production, cravings simply don’t enter the picture. To be so wrapped up in a performance that your body forgets its own semblance of imbalance is a wonderful thing. It is to leave your physical body behind, float to the roof of the auditorium and exist as only your senses, imagination and thoughts. It is investment to the extent of forgetting yourself.

Of course, such investment is a greasy and fragile thing, readily broken by the tiniest of intrusions; a sniffle here, a rustle there. One sure-fire way in which to snap through it, however, is to put a cigarette onstage.

Yet a cigarette smoked on screen will not have the same effect. The other week, I watched Brian Cox and Shaun Parks work their way through at least a packet in the television adaptation of Blue/Orange without once becoming distracted by it. The same is true of Marlon Brando. Or Sharon Stone. Or Pinocchio.

But two hours into A Disappearing Number, when Paul Bhattacharajee lit up as Aninda Rao on the banks of the Cooum river near Chennai, I was instantly back in the Barbican. For me, the mere sight of a cigarette was enough to trigger a relapse into reality. Perhaps it’s because of the firm conflict itself; there’s no SkyPlus pause button to turn to for a brief break. Or perhaps it’s something more.

At the start of A Disappearing Number, Complicité go to great lengths to highlight the fictitious: no one is on the other end of this phone, this door leads nowhere in particular, etc. The only real thing, they point out, is the maths. But the cigarette and the response it triggers are equally real, existent in front of you.

The performance goes on, with mathematical sleight of hand, to coax an entire audience of individuals into thinking of the number seven in unison. The same magic happens with the cigarette. Gradually, invisible wisps of tobacco smoke begin to drift through the auditorium, curling into noses and brains. The same trick is repeated, though this time remains unflagged, as swathes of audience members prick up on nicotine alert. I deeply hope it was a conscious decision, perhaps signalling the nearing of the end through unspoken physical response.

Theatre, as Alan Read and many others have pointed out, happens in the air between performers and audience. That air moves, vibrates, contains waves of light, jets of breath and pathways of smoke. Onstage smoking is real in a way that onscreen, it can never be. It doesn’t only remind the brain, it reacts with the body. It makes you remember yourself.

Again, on Saturday, watching Frantic Assembly’s Othello, a performer smokes. He is in the middle of a dance, half period, half modern. The glow of the cigarette moves about the stage: a firefly in the midst of revels. I can’t take my eyes of it. Will someone get caught with a sharp burn? What happens if it drops to the carpet? Surely that’s a hindrance to the dancer’s fitness? There is suddenly an element, however small, of danger, a heightened sense of risk, a precarious skill on show.

Ever since Mel Smith leaned out of a Scottish window, cigar in hand, vowing to defy the smoking ban, there has been another thought at play. A cigarette onstage must be “artistically justifiable”. This affects the smoker and the non-smoker alike. A cigarette onstage is no longer an arbitrary choice; it must have dramaturgical significance. It must be more than just a cigarette. As such, it cannot be overlooked for other goings on; it needs, nay, craves, being puzzled – a ticking challenge to the audience member that must be answered.

Unless it’s herbal, in which case its very fakeness proves more fatal.

With all this, there can be no such thing as the innocent cigarette onstage. It is the glowing destroyer of fictions and the diverter of attentions.