Haze!!!

Actors!

It’s just haze!

It’s not ‘smoke’, it’s not floating ash, it’s not blackened carbon that’s going to clog up your lungs and fill your mouth with tar!

It doesn’t make you cough, it doesn’t make you splutter, it won’t blind you, suffocate you, intoxicate you or any other diverse chemical reaction of any nature whatsoever!

It is not something you get to blame when your voice is going because you’ve been shouting instead of projecting; you don’t get to deride its presence if you’re about to sing a song, it does not, in fact, induce watery eyes or swollen lips, that would be last night’s chemical adventures coming back to haunt you, you irredeemable plonker.  It does not make you harder to spot for your agent, but rather means instead of standing in a circle of light, you are now standing in a shaft of light, your body highlighted in full three dimensional glory.  The sound of a hazer fan is not, in fact, insufferable; the fact that the three idiots in the very front row are coughing as the haze drifts towards them is not because they’re having a genuine reaction, but because audiences assume that something which looks like smoke, is in fact smoke, even though really, it doesn’t, and it ISN’T!

If you really want to complain about something, if you’re absolutely sincere in trying the patience of your lighting designer – go lie down in the path of a CO2 fogger, then we can talk!