Birmingham Rep’s production reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet
Victorian melodrama was not a purely escapist genre, nor was it necessarily conservative. With its mix of epic action and often plebeian characters, David Mayer points out, this “deformed hybrid” genre, indebted to the radical messiness of early modern tragicomedy, depicted relatable character types struggling to respond effectively to injustice. Unlike comedy, melodrama “acknowledged and celebrated common folk.” Unlike classical tragedy, it “injected moments of mirth into serious business,” provoking nervous and critical laughter. It also refused to resolve its plots with the orderly restoration of a survivable status quo.
These are precisely the melodrama conventions in which Joe Murphy’s production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s melodrama Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barbet of Fleet Street, a Musical Thriller, starring West End performer Ramin Karimloo, revels. Murphy, Karimloo, and their collaborators redeem and reanimate that misunderstood genre by following the laws of melodrama and also by doing something that no other major production of Sweeney Todd has done. Namely, they go back to the story’s original source – James Malcolm Rymer’s 1846-7 popular fiction serial The String of Pearls. This Sweeney Todd deploys eighteenth and nineteenth century modes, genres, and text to say something powerful and urgent.
Gustave Doré. Paradise Lost no. 12: The Spiritual Descent of Lucifer into Satan. Wikimedia Commons.
In a programme note, Australian comedy-cabaret performance artist Meow Meow, who plays Mrs. Lovett, states that this production is true to the original “penny bloods and dreadfuls,” which she considers mythic in scope and effect. Indeed, the show begins by invoking the penny serial and its woodcuts, but without pastiche. At the opening, there is a dim murmur of unmelodic tonal noise, reminiscent of traffic or crowd noise. The proscenium arch of Birmingham Rep’s stage is covered by a sort of archaic fire curtain which is strikingly illustrated with a black-and-white painting copied from Gustave Dore’s woodcut “The Fall of Lucifer (Paradise Lost no. 12). Like the Victorian readers of a penny serial such as the original Sweeney Todd text, James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls, a Romance, the audience confronts an alarming, enticing black-and-white illustration and is drawn in.
Meow Meow (Mrs. Lovett) and Ramin Karimloo (Sweeney Todd). Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Photo by Manuel Harlan.
There are other indications that this is the first staging of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd informed by Rymer’s penny romance. Rymer’s tale is set in 1785 (which Rymer erroneously considers early in the reign of George III), not, like most productions, the early Victorian era. The costumes are solidly eighteenth century: the men wear knee breeches, white stockings, long vests, tricorne hats, and buckled court shoes. Elite men wear wigs. Women shuffle about in panniers. All this combines with pops of rich colour, conspicuous makeup, and rubbery facial expressions to make the style, as Murphy has said, “Hogarthian.” This, too, is refreshingly authentic; as Rohan McWilliam has pointed out, Hogarth is an evident if critically neglected inspiration for the String of Pearls’ characters’ progress through the corrupt life of the eighteenth-century Square Mile.
Ramin Karimloo (Sweeney Todd) and David Bedella (Judge Turpin). Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Photo by Manuel Harlan.
Melodrama requires villains who are both atavistically evil and reminiscent of real social or political ills. Adhering to this principle, Murphy’s production refocuses Sondheim’s masterpiece on a character somewhat sidelined in the original 1979 staging: Judge Turpin (David Bedella). He is less an evil genius than a component of a corrupt conglomerate. Short, thin, swallowed up by a too-long frock coat, the Judge seems to lurk in the shadow of his outrageously dandyish Beadle, a confection bursting out of a pink suit seemingly inspired by not only Hogarth, but the caricatures of James Gillray and the grotesque radical satire of Henry Fuseli. Sweeney Todd depicts the “failure of institutions,” Murphy has said. The institution of justice has failed because the Beadle enables absolute evil while respectably “obliging” his “friends and neighbours.”
Melodrama is also synonymous with the pose. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, the stock poses and mise-en-scenes of the run-of-the-mill ‘dreadful’. As Mrs. Lovett, unrequitedly in love with Todd (or, perhaps, only his lost former self Benjamin Barker), Meow Meow strikes a parade of melodramatic poses. She is the heroine only in her own mind: to the outside world, she’s a wannabe and a laughingstock. Meanwhile, the young lovers strike stock poses with commitment that produces authenticity. Antony Hope the Sailor (Shem Omari James) and Johanna (Jo Stephenson) are utterly serious and therefore utterly convincing. Johanna, no damsel in distress, resists the Judge’s tyranny with the courage and audacity of her original in Rymer’s serial. Anthony’s principled, eloquent resistance to the Judge and Beadle’s tyranny is heroic. Furthermore, the casting of James, a Black actor as Anthony turns the Beadle’s taunts about “scallywags” in “this area” into racist dog whistles and, more urgently, perhaps makes less invisible the contributions to the victory over Napoleon of forgotten Black sailors such as the iconic and tragic William “Billy” Waters.
The one character whose acting is realist, not melodramatic, is Sweeney Todd (Ramin Karimloo). This decision combines with Karimloo’s always animated and powerful singing to render his Sweeney Todd a real person caught in the Manichean nightmare of a melodrama universe.
Lady Justice at the Old Bailey. Wikimedia Commons.
Finally, something must be said about the set. If the costumes and acting style derive from melodrama, the set does not. There are no painted backdrops, no Pepper’s Ghost or other impressive technological effects. The set consists of monumental white stairs topped with a version of the statue of Lady Justice that famously distinguishes London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey, just steps away from Sweeney Todd’s Fleet Street business address. Soot blackens the street level of the white marble, representing corruption of magisterial institutions. The steps themselves are a character. They suggest many symbolically potent places at once: the Old Bailey, but also the proto-Fascist Temple of Moloch in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and perhaps, a short walk away from Birmingham Rep, the monumental staircase of Birmingham’s Waterloo Square.
There are a few moments when Sondheim’s story, transposed from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth, sounds anachronistic. In 1785, how can Tobias claim that if a man has “hair like Shelley / you can tell he’s / used Pirelli’s,” when Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792? How can the Beadle sing at the spinet–hilariously–about the alarm bells ringing “in the Tower of Bray” when the British built Bray Head Tower on Ireland’s Valentina Island as a lookout point to intercept a potential Napoleonic invasion, in 1805? Ultimately, these few anachronisms don’t matter. This production’s intentional mix of historical acting styles, powerhouse singing, and genuine outrage against the failure of institutions and the way that individuals and communities enable injustice and violence give Sondheim’s musical something urgent and memorable to say. For lovers of Victorian popular culture, this Sweeney Todd is also a vivid reminder of why melodrama spoke to its original audiences and why, now, we should continue to attend the tale.
Rebecca Nesvet is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Her book James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family (Routledge 2024), the first study of Sweeney Todd creator Rymer, won the Victorian Popular Fiction Association’s First Book Prize. She is working on a project about Sweeney Todd as a multimedia meme, 1846-1936.