TOBACCO, so the conventional wisdom goes, is bad for you. And love, so they say, is good for you. But sometimes relationships can be far more toxic — and addictive — than any taboo substance.The contradictions of the ties that bind form the nub of the play Tobacco and the Harmful Effects Thereof — a deceptively scholarly title for a majestic work that is one of the most mind-expanding new scripts SA has seen in a while.Well, this play (on at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre until March 6) is new in a sense: rising young SA playwright William Harding has adapted it from the 1902 one-act play On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco by Anton Chekhov, about a hen-pecked husband delivering a town-hall lecture about the dangers of smoking, egged on by his domineering wife.Harding has extended and, arguably, elevated and enhanced the original by the great Russian master. He deftly splices in snippets of philosophy, poetry and music (from Vivaldi to the art-rock soundscapes of Dead Can Dance), culmi...
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