Sweeney Todd

Published Wednesday 15 February 2006 at 17:00 by John Thaxter

Sondheim’s masterpiece is a melodramatic horror story of revenge at the razor’s edge with a side serving of cannibal pie. But its highly charged scenario and insinuating score work best as chamber opera.

This is proved conclusively with John Doyle’s small-scale revival which, after playing to acclaim at the Watermill and in the West End, became a major hit on Broadway, now touring the regions with a versatile new cast led by Jason Donovan as the demon barber of Fleet Street.

On an otherwise bare stage backed by a towering dresser and slatted walls, we first encounter him emerging from a pauper’s coffin, an embittered sinister figure with dead eyes, whose song of love is addressed to his razors.

Doyle favours actor-musicians, a ten-strong ensemble playing their own accompaniment while singing and acting in what might be accounted a concert performance. But despite the simplest of means - no barber’s chair, just buckets of blood at each killing, the dazed victim donning a blood-spattered lab coat - the effect is often more theatrically charged than conventional stagings.

Harriet Thorpe in the sole starry performance is a sumptuous, gruesomely loveable Mrs Lovett in A Little Priest, her hymn to human flesh. But other eye-catching performances include blonde Joanna Hickman as a Du Pre-like, cello-playing Johanna, and Gemma Page on clarinet as a stooping Beggar Woman like Mrs Overall from Acorn Antiques.

The outstanding voice is high-tenor James Spilling, whose Tobias in a Bedlam straitjacket perfectly catches the ‘Dies Irae’ influence in the insistent Sweeney Todd theme as both urgent prelude and sombre finale.