Sweeney Todd: His Life, Times and Execution

A penny dreadful with substance, this show brings new meaning to the term “gallows humour”. Each slice of visual beauty is filled with charming cabaret performers. There's puppetry and there’s dance and there’s live music.

Tracking Sweeney Todd’s life from cradle to noose, this is a witty celebration of his life in which shadow puppetry meets physical comedy and original music meets original talent, and which twins the Enlightenment’s drive for social betterment with the dog-eat-dog barbarism of everyday life in the east end of London.

This is fresh meat; a Sweeney unlike any other. Its flavour is wholly different from Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Frank Wurzinger’s Sweeney is not a driven murderer but a careless clown, accidentally slaughtering the comic stereotypes of the British empire.

He’s the Sorceror’s Apprentice with razor blades and the sweetest Todd ever to cut a cheek. Very tall but very meek. Lizzie Wort’s saucy Mrs Lovett is the spirit of east end sleaze, a cocky wench from Gin Lane who you would still ask to dine.

The cast are spectacular fun. Their humour and manner is similar to the madcap performers at the Edinburgh Dungeons, personally welcoming the audience into the auditorium but firmly keeping a distance during the performance.

Shattering the fourth wall before its victims are in their chairs, the jovial grotesqueness of Conrad Sharp, musical aptitude of Helen Taylor and comic charm of Alfie Boyd are instantly alluring.

The artistic style of the production is distinctly German expressionist; there’s something of the Tim Burton in the irregular angles of the set and pallid whiteness of the cartoonish make-up design. Flickering lights fall crisply on the performers evoking the crackling film of early nineteenth-century silent films, an appropriately apt reflection of Sweeney’s clownish muteness. Dust hangs in their wigs and catches the light beautifully, offering luscious tableaux rather reminiscent of old engravings.

A treat to be relished. I absolutely loved it.