La Tosca - Reception

Reception

Considered by Jerome Hart to be the most emotional of all Sardou's plays, La Tosca's critical reception was in sharp contrast to that of the opening night audience. The Parisian critics roundly attacked the play with Francisque Sarcey calling it a "pantomime", as did Jules Lemaître. Jules Favre writing in Les Annales politiques et littéraires called it a "vulgar piece, without intrigue, without characters, without morals". The New York Times correspondent reported the play's resounding success with the audience, but like many commentators of the day, including Favre, largely attributed it to Sarah Bernhardt's powerful performance, noting that:

There is not much of play, a mere outline at best, made to fit like a glove the talent and personality of Bernhardt who is all and everything, but who should or could complain? The interest never slackens; there is enough dialogue and apropos to keep both gratification and amusement entertained, and the story enobles itself magically in the hands of the greatest living actress.

Writing from the perspective of the late 20th century, Nicassio agrees that Bernhardt's performance as a character essentially like herself, a celebrated, amorous, and temperamental diva, was undoubtedly a key factor in the play's success with the Paris audience. However, she cites other factors which also played a part: the "exotic" Italian setting with sumptuous sets and costumes, the play's anti-clerical themes, and a plot glorifying the Bonapartists as the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution approached.

Following the London premiere in 1888, Cecil Howard wrote that the play was even more popular there than it had been in Paris. Like several critics describing the Paris premiere, he devoted a large part of his review to Bernhardt's performance, which he said held the audience "breathless and rapt", but he had little admiration for Sardou's drama:

As to the play itself, I will only add that it is offensive in its morals, corrupt in its teaching, and revolting in its brutality, and yet everyone who admires acting is bound to see it.

The "unchaste" behaviour of the heroine and the violence and brutality depicted in the play, although relatively mild by modern standards, disturbed not only critics at the time, but also some play-goers. The audience's reaction to Tosca's suicide at the American premiere caused Fanny Davenport to change the ending in subsequent performances with the firing squad taking aim at Tosca while she grieves over Cavaradossi's lifeless body, an ending also used by Sarah Bernhardt when she performed the play in Fort Worth, Texas in 1892. William Winter went so far as to warn American women that La Tosca contained scenes which were "not only shocking to the nervous system and grossly offensive to persons of true sensibility, but which might inflict irreparable injury on persons yet unborn." Several early critics, including Arthur Bingham Walkley and Jules Lemaître, wrote at length on Scarpia's graphic description of Cavaradossi's torture and the sound of his off-stage screams in Act 3, which they considered both gratuitously violent and inartistic. However, this was not a view shared by Oscar Wilde, who found the torture scene moving in its depiction of "a terrible human tragedy". George Bernard Shaw intensely disliked all of Sardou's work, and not surprisingly characterised La Tosca, which he saw in London in 1890, as a "clumsily constructed, empty-headed turnip ghost of a cheap shocker", while presciently suggesting that it would make a good opera.

Despite the views of the critics, La Tosca proved to be phenomenally successful. It ultimately had 3000 performances in France alone, played in theatres all over the world for thirty years, and netted Sardou 500,000 francs. Sarah Bernhardt's costumes brought Empire silhouette dresses back into style, and the long walking stick she carried in Act 1 became a new fashion accessory. Both a leopard in a famous New York menagerie and an American race horse were named in honour of the play's heroine, as were numerous dishes, several of them created by the French chef, Auguste Escoffier, a devotee of Bernhardt.