It has been three years since the introduction of the smoking ban in public places, and there are certain things that still utterly incense me, one of which being the fact that smoking cannot be portrayed on stage in Scotland.

The Edinburgh Festival is about to begin, and I remember three years ago, just after the start of the ban, the actor Mel Smith was due to appear at the festival portraying one of our most revered leaders, Winston Churchill. Anyone who knows even the slightest morsel of history should be fully aware that the great man himself was an avid cigar smoker. However, if Mel Smith portrayed the man accurately, i.e. lit up a cigar on stage he would be fined £50 and the venue that allowed him to do so would be fined £2,000.

The severity of the punishment is allegedly to protect non-smokers from the risks of passive smoking. However, I hardly think that a single cigar lit in a large theatre would have caused lung cancer on an unprecedented scale amongst the audience. It did, however, make the performance slightly less authentic.

There are many, many wonderful pieces of theatre where smoking is rather intrinsic to the plot. I can’t imagine a version of Sarah Kane’s Blasted where the main character, Ian, is not allowed to smoke.  There are stage directions in Equus where Alan Strang smokes.  Can you honestly imagine Mrs Robinson not being allowed to smoke in The Graduate?

In order to smoke on stage in England you have to prove that smoking is absolutely essential to the artistic integrity of the play (and you are, of course, only allowed to smoke herbal cigarettes), but in Scotland the ban is outright. This is pure censorship. To claim that this is for ‘health benefits’ is utter nonsense. The least that the government could do is to be honest and admit that they are striving to ‘denormalise’ smokers.  And I thought we lived in a society of freedom of speech, where censorship was frowned upon. Try telling that to the Edinburgh theatres…