Content area
Full Text
The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend, by Robert L. Mack (London: Continuum, 2007), 375pp., £25 hb; ISBN 978-0-8264-9791-8.
Sweeney Todd presents a fascinating and probably unique story in terms of its origin, legacy and cultural reinvention. An extremely potent urban legend, it still has advocates, most notably Peter Haining who, in his own 1993 study (revised in 2007), insist that it is a true story. An anonymously published 'Penny Dreadful' in the 1840s The String of Pearls was inevitably dramatised and George Dibdin Pitt's play became a favourite melodrama on the Victorian stage. In the twentieth century it continued to have a stage life, most prominently with Stephen Sondheim's 1979 'Musical Thriller', but significantly the 'demon barber' transfers efficaciously to the screen with interpretations by a surprisingly diverse range of actors including: Moore Marriott (1928): Tod Slaughter (1936); Freddie Jones (1970); John Miranda (1970); Ben Kingsley (1998); Ray Winstone (2006); and, in the screen adaptation of Sondheim, Johnny Depp (2007). Sweeney Todd is perfect material for the screen for the very reasons that make it such a challenge for the stage: film can fully exploit the potential of this tale of terror with its close-up shaves, mechanical chair and butchery and its all-important variations in locale with its everyday barbershop and bakery concealing its basement of horrors.
The dreadful partners in crime Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett have become icons of horror: not like the 'Transylvanian' monsters made so popular by the golden age of Universal Pictures and beyond,...