Popular culture’s serial killers rarely resemble their real-life counterparts. Generally, we get ripped rippers and ice-cool assassins rather than the sort of social misfits found staring blankly from the news pages. Sondheim’s demon barber and his partner in prime cuts often get the same gloss. In Tim Burton’s film version they seemed like pristine porcelain dolls, butchering the hirsute of London with a balletic grace.
Not so with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton. The brilliance of their confederacy is that they are both at once: cartoonish but chillingly sociopathic. They share a cross-eyed intensity, but otherwise make a perfectly mismatched pairing. Ball is barrel-chested and still as a mountain; Staunton’s Mrs Lovett is impish and fidgety. One zen, one manic. Their age difference – only six years, but it seems more – elevates the delicious perversity of the arrangement and their relationship – obsessed landlady rather than heated lovers – has a ring of Orton or Pinter to it. She drools over him, as he fixes his attention on his razor blades.
The actor’s challenge with Sweeney Todd is that we must cheer him all the way to his downfall and death. Ball handles it with easy flair and greasy hair. Every sinew of his body is devoted to taking revenge on those responsible for the death of his wife. When he flicks away Mrs Lovett’s profit-driven protestations, his resolution is admirable, but nonetheless repulsive. His eyes have a permanent glint, catching the light like his trusty blades, but it finally melts into a teary sheen; first fait accompli, then fate tragic.
Staunton, meanwhile, tiptoes between the humour and detached gruesomeness of Mrs Lovett blissfully. Her opening number, The Worst Pies in London, is given the bray of a woman frazzled to the very edge of sanity. She sings as if her larynx is covered in flour. Yet, elsewhere, she can be meltingly tender, summoning traces of a long-repressed maternal instinct for Not While I’m Around. You never know which Mrs Lovett you’re going to get and, while Staunton stops short of schizophrenia, she is brilliantly unhinged.
Almost everything in Jonathan Kent’s production is exquisitely done. In particular, Anthony Ward’s set, a towering East London of broken window panes and metal fire escapes, is gorgeous. Terrifically lit by Mark Henderson, it gets all the Hogarthian grime of the city’s gutters and the scale of its industrial warehouses. Ward’s 1930’s setting, suggesting a distant depression, also offsets hints of Victorian workhouses with flashes of 1950’s Americana: Pirelli’s travelling stall and con routine, the spangley new bulb sign above Mrs Lovett’s shop, Sweeney’s retro-red barber’s chair. It all delicately underscores the edges of their cutthroat capital gains.
Then, of course, there is Sondheim’s astonishing layered score, which reads clearly even to the most untrained ear (i.e. my own). He contrasts the buttery love songs of Anthony and Johanna (Luke Brady and Lucy May Barker) with sharp, shrill metallic clangs that suggest the clatter of a cutlery draw. All this without sacrificing the odd take home number; Johanna, in particular, seeps silkily into your brain as if by osmosis. From time to time a steam whistle explodes with a shriek, jolting you forward like a high voltage shock.
And yet, admirable though this production’s component parts are, Sondheim’s musical is not flawless. Yes, it’s smart enough to pick up the pace to a stunning climax that sends you home reeling. But the first half is exposition heavy and its songs often say the same thing over and over, without the necessarily ticklish play of A Little Priest. At times you’re longing for the throat-slashing to commence. Furthermore, though it adds tonal variety, the young lovers subplot just can’t compete.
However, a little patience does nothing to blunt a production as stunning, steely and eloquently acted as this.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton
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