Edinburgh
‘Oh, God, you couldn’t buy that publicity!’ people exclaimed as Mel Smith appeared on the front page of a clutch of newspapers, on radio and TV and finally on the world news channels.
Mel is Winston Churchill in my play Allegiance (which depicts the night that Churchill and Michael Collins got drunk together in 1921), and a fracas had arisen about his entitlement to smoke the Churchillian cigar. Heroic Mel was insisting on lighting up the Havana on stage, in defiance of Scotland’s draconian anti-smoking laws. Just before curtain-up on Monday morning, a rumour went around that the police were standing by, the heavies of the Edinburgh Council were waiting to pounce, the Assembly Rooms venue would be closed down, the theatre’s director, William Burdett-Coutts, would be fined £5,000, everyone would be put out of work and any fees earned would be confiscated. To save everyone being fired and all productions closed down, Mel relented, at the last moment, by not actually lighting the cigar. The next day the Scotsman bannered the decision ‘The law 1, artistic freedom 0’, and the evening papers splashed with ‘Mel Smith climbs down over smoking ban’.
But it wasn’t a publicity stunt — although it did generate publicity — and by mid-week the show was gratifyingly selling out. This was a genuine protest against Scotland’s anti-smoking laws, which are carried to a more fanatical extreme than Ireland’s. In Ireland, smoking is permitted for dramatic performances where the text calls for it: fags to be herbal, but cigars can be real. And the text does call for it. In Allegiance, Churchill offers Collins a cigar as a gesture of male bonding — and also to encourage him towards a more sybaritic approach to life.
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