When the Michael Hunt, producer of Waterford’s Tosca, was explaining his version of the opera to us he mentioned that the third act was going to take place in the square outside the Bishops Palace.
“Unfortunately” he said “the safety people won’t permit us to have Tosca throw her self off this at the end so we have had to find another way”
(She performed the dirty deed with a pistol on the night)
I was reminded by this of an anecdote that Gerald Durrell relates in his wonderfully funny autobiography; My Family and Other Animals.
Theodore, a character with a great store of anecdotes about Corfu tells the story.
It appears that a travelling opera company arrives in Corfu to perform a version of Tosca.
This is how Theodore tells it:
“The singer who took the part of Tosca was exceptionally well developed.
As you know in the final act the heroine casts herself to her doom from the battlements of a castle.
On the first night the heroine climbed up the castle walls and cast herself on to the rocks below. Unfortunately it appears that the stage hands had forgotten to put anything beneath the walls for her to land on. The result was that the crash of her landing and the subsequent yells of pain distracted somewhat from the impression that she was a shattered corpse on the rocks below.
The heroine was, rather naturally, somewhat upset by this incident, so, the following night the stage hands threw themselves with enthusiasm into the job of giving her a pleasant landing.
The heroine, somewhat battered, managed to hobble her way through the opera until she reached the final scene.
Then she again climbed on to the battlements, sang her last song , and cast herself to her death.
Unfortunately the stage hands, having made the landing too hard on the first occasion, had gone to the opposite extreme. The huge pile of mattresses was so resilient that the heroine hit them and then bounced up again.
So that when the cast was down at the footlights, telling each other she was dead, the upper portions of the heroine appeared two or three times above the battlements, to the mystification of the audience.”