When smoking becomes freedom of expression

(spiked) When George Bernard Shaw’s play about prostitution, Mrs Warren’s Profession, was first shown in New York in 1905, the police invaded the theatre, arrested the director and his entire cast, threw them into a cell for a night, and charged them with ‘offending public decency’.
A new production of Mrs Warren’s Profession, at the Selwyn Theatre on 42nd Street, is potentially politically combustible for a different reason - not because it features an unapologetic madam, but because one of the characters smokes. That’s as likely to outrage today’s defenders of decency as much as Shaw’s poke in the eye to sexual hypocrisy rattled yesteryear’s. Continued

Photo: G. B. Shaw (Library of Congress).