Sweeney Todd, English National Opera, review: 'a whacking great banquet'

ENO's excellent new production of Sondheim's musical saw great performances from its stars Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson, says Rupert Christiansen

Sweeney Todd: the ENO's version features Emma Thompson as Mrs Lovett and Bryn Terfel as Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd: the ENO's version features Emma Thompson as Mrs Lovett and Bryn Terfel as Sweeney Todd Credit: Photo: Alastair Muir

Brutal and macabre, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd deliberately turns its back on the sentimental feelgood world of musical comedy to confront something really not very nice - humanity’s atavistic desire for revenge and its gloating fascination with the glamour of murder.

Driven by a score that crudely parodies the Catholic mass, the plot offers a shilling’s worth of penny-dreadful schlock peopled by coarse caricatures. There’s no sugar in the brew, and no subtle flavouring either.

Instead, like some low-budget slasher movie, its combination of black humour and bloody horror thrills and chills, even as it sickens - and, given that potent combination of effects, it’s no wonder that it probably now ranks as the biggest hit of Sondheim’s career, with a remarkably protean capacity to shrink or expand its dimensions without losing its iron grip.

Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel in Sweeney Todd (Photo: Alastair Muir)

Two current productions demonstrate this forcefully. On Shaftesbury Avenue, you can see a highly acclaimed fringe theatre version, staged in a life-size reconstruction of Mrs Lovett’s cannibalistic Pie & Mash Shop - described last week by my colleague Dominic Cavndish as “a scrumptious little treat.”

At the London Coliseum, on the other hand, a whacking great banquet is on offer, with a cast led by a major film star in Emma Thompson and a Wagnerian heavyweight in Bryn Terfel. Officially billed as a “concert staging” and framed by a concept imported from Lincoln Center, it puts the full orchestra on stage and lines the evening-dressed soloists up in front of music stands.

Don’t worry, however - the director Lonny Price has up his sleeve a few surprises I don’t want to spoil, and, while his efforts won’t efface memories of Declan Donnellan’s claustral National Theatre production, audiences at the Coliseum aren’t going to feel short-changed for dramatic interest and Broadway energy.

Sweeney Todd: the chilling figure at work

Nor do the main attractions disappoint. Terfel’s Demon Barber may be a familiar quantity in London, but he continues to command the role with a laconic intensity which makes Todd’s monomania all the more mesmerising. Singing with steely restraint and a welcome lack of rasp or rant, he portrays a Byronic wanderer, with a tormented inner life.

An even bigger pleasure was provided by Emma Thompson, whose performance on Broadway drew rave reviews. I last saw her on stage when she graced the Cambridge Foolights in the Seventies, and she has got on my nerves fairly persistently ever since. But she makes a terrific Mrs Lovett, hitting just the right balance between endearing naivete and ruthless amorality, as well as singing meticulously and without affectation. Her flights of fancy in “By the sea” become irresistible a comic tour de force.

What disturbs me about the show is that apart from the orchestra - which plays with a light but firm touch under David Charles Abell - nothing about the production is ENO home-grown. A project which should have capitalised on the company’s strengths has been entirely farmed out: all the remaining soloists, as well as the chorus, are West End show performers, and very good they are too (outstanding among them being Matthew Seadon-Young as a geeky Anthony and Philip Quast as a lasciviously decadent Judge Turpin). But why are none of ENO’s regular or young artists involved?

The presence of Thompson and Terfel in the cast has ensured that the brief run has already sold out. What next? If a return to Sondheim’s oeuvre is contemplated, I’d like to think that the management would plump for that subtly sophisticated cocktail A Little Night Music - a homage to classic operetta and perhaps the composer’s supreme masterpiece, as well as something that would offer ENO opportunities to cast its own personnel more fruitfully.

Sweeney Todd: director Lonny Price, conductor David Charles Abell, and stars Emma Thompson, Rosalie Craig and Katie Hall (Photo: Rex)

Buy tickets to Sweeney Todd from Telegraph Boxoffice