From Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 38/1 (Summer 2011)
AFTERWORD
THE CANNIBALISATION OF SWEENEY TODD
Jim Davis
On commencing this paper on Sweeney Todd I checked a number of general histories
to see if this particular melodrama, perhaps one of the most widely known examples of the
genre, was mentioned. To my surprise there was no reference in any of the standard histories
of nineteenth-century theatre and drama, including the recent Cambridge History of British
Theatre, and only a cursory reference to a later version of the play in The Cambridge
Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre.1 Even the standard works on melodrama
pay it minimal attention or none at all. One notable exception is Daniel Gerould’s anthology
of criticism, which devotes space largely to Sondheim’s version, while also including a useful
‘Toddography’.2 Yet, in general, this is a play which seems to be omitted from the broad
surveys of nineteenth-century British theatre and melodrama. What factors have determined
this omission? Why is it that most discussions of this melodrama, where they exist, are
grounded in broader discussions of Sondheim’s music theatre piece?
George Dibdin Pitt’s The String of Pearls, was performed at the Britannia Saloon for
one week commencing on 1 March, 1847, and then was moved to second place on the bill for
a further week. (Hardly ‘the Brit’s biggest smash’, which is how it is described in the
introduction to the published text of Sondheim’s musical.)3 Since the Britannia rarely
attracted reviews at the time and since the play was not particularly notorious on its first
showing (although revived frequently thereafter), it is impossible to discuss its initial
reception. However, the version submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval survives,
although, as Sharon Weltman demonstrates, it differs substantially from the first version to be
published in 1883 by Dicks. There were many subsequent adaptations of the Sweeney Todd
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story, but a somewhat surprising statement about the value of these earlier versions is made
by Stephen Sondheim:
In fact, all these earlier Sweeney Todd plays were very boring and essentially overwritten one-act dramas with one or two central incidents and a great deal of
padding....All the interest and suspense had to do with the scenic effects and with
wondering whether or not somebody was going to get killed in the chair. Todd was a
villain, and Mrs Lovett was merely an accomplice – and a secondary one at that.
There was no attitude or tone. It was simply a matter of seeing everyone get caught in
the end.4
Sondheim’s line, and that of Christopher Bond, on whose version of the melodrama Sweeney
Todd5 Sondheim’s musical thriller was based, is that they revived and improved upon a
quintessentially nineteenth-century play by giving it a ‘twentieth-century sensibility’ or, more
specifically, by endowing its leading character with ‘motivation.’6 In the Bond and Sondheim
versions Sweeney Todd has been unjustly imprisoned and returns to London with one overriding obsession: revenge. It seems that only through the provision of such motivation,
thereby turning Sweeney Todd from melodramatic villain to ‘tragic hero’7, could the play
also take on social implications. Hal Prince, who directed the original production of the
musical, felt it important to emphasise social context. According to Sondheim:
Hal believes that Sweeney Todd is a story about how society makes you impotent,
and impotence leads to rage, and rage leads to murder and, in fact, to the breaking
down of society.8
Prince says that he began to see Sweeney’s revenge as being against the class system and that
In a larger way I felt that by placing the action in its late (sic) nineteenth-century
context we could say that from the day the Industrial Revolution entered our lives, the
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conveyor belt pulled us further and further from harmony, from humanity, from
nature.9
Thus Sweeney becomes ‘an ordinary working-class man, whose life is invaded and destroyed
by a malevolent social system’ and becomes ‘representative of those who, without money or
influence, try vainly to exact justice from a corrupt and ruthless power structure’. 10
Ostensibly then Sondheim, and Bond before him, ‘radicalised’ the work of George
Dibdin Pitt, who created the first Sweeney Todd melodrama, although neither seem to be
aware that Pitt was one of the more socially radical dramatists of his time. According to
Dwayne Brenna ‘[Pitt’s] vision grew decidedly darker after 1843’11, by which time he had
moved permanently to the Britannia. Most of Pitt’s melodramas sided with the poor and the
underdog, whether servant-girls, as in the case of Susan Hopley, or the victims of
drunkenness and urban life, as in The Bottle and The Drunkard’s Children. Of The String of
Pearls Brenna writes:
The play is notable for its bleak view of an immoral urban society. The image of
supposedly civilized human beings cannibalizing one another makes a nice metaphor
for the perils of out-of-control industrialization and capitalism.12
Brenna sees Pitt as a leading proponent and innovator of the domestic drama, writing plays
‘in an increasingly democratic and capitalistic age….for the new working class.’13
There are a number of factors that differentiate the The String of Pearls from
Sondheim’s musical. Pitt’s original audiences would have shown little excitement over who
was or was not next to get killed in the chair, despite Sondheim’s assertion quoted above, for
the simple reason that the chair was not, as far as can be ascertained, a property used in the
original production. Both the manuscript submitted to the Lord Chamberlain and the playbill
for the first production refer to the use of a ‘vampire trap’, opened after Sweeney has
wounded or murdered his victims and stamped on the floor. It is possible that the chair was
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therefore a subsequent addition: it certainly figures in the later, much altered published
edition of the play. The musical locates the action in the Victorian – Hal Prince even asserts
late-Victorian – era and critics commented on the mixture of Victorian London and northern
industrial landscape that characterized the original set for Sondheim’s musical. The landscape
described in Dickens’s Hard Times was even invoked by one commentator, Robert
Kimball.14 Yet Dibdin Pitt’s version is set in the opening years of the reign of George III –
arguably closer to the start of the Industrial Revolution rather than to its midst and to the age
of Hogarth rather than that of Dickens.
More strikingly it is the elemental, the demonical, the inexplicable in Sweeney Todd
that Sondheim’s musical ignores and which the comments of Bond, Sondheim and Prince
generally fail to acknowledge. Early in Pitt’s version Todd dreams that his nemesis, Hector,
has turned into a hideous fiend who throttles him, while his assistant, Jean Parmine, refers to
him as ‘the arch-fiend.’ At the end of the play Todd is shot and staggers to the centre of the
stage, where he suffers dreadful convulsions. His final speech, eliminated in the first
published version of the play, leaves us in no doubt that he is about to suffer divine
retribution:
Save me, save me, on every side, from every quarter they range like fearful fiend-like
apes, they move and grin at me, mercy, mercy, I dare expect none – I show’d none,
see the Shop, the Parlour passes round in quick and bleeding succession – the trap
door yawns, numbers of hideous faces are looking upon me, save me, save me, and in
mercy forever visit my memory and suffer my tears of Penitence to be registered
My String of Pearls.
In Sondheim’s version the conclusion is more sentimental and re-invests Todd with the
capacity for human feeling. He learns that the Beggar Woman whose throat he has just slit is
the wife he thought had died many years before and on account of whom he has become
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obsessed with revenge. In one later production, by Susan Schulman, Todd was described as
achieving the sort of catharsis that gave him full dimension as a tragic hero as he howled over
the corpse of his dead wife: ‘As corpses pile up in the apocalyptic finale, this version urges
spectators not only to think but also to feel.’15
Brenna suggests that ‘The String of Pearls was one of the most terrifying portraits of
urban life ever to appear on the London stage’16, at a time when crime and in particular its
punishment were very much a popular spectacle. In 1849 the public execution of Mr and Mrs
Manning provoked Dickens to write to The Times to complain at the impact it had upon the
spectators assembled to witness it. ‘I do not believe’, he wrote, ‘that any community can
prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralisation as was enacted this morning outside
Horsemonger Lane Gaol is presented at the very doors of good citizens, and is passed by
unknown or forgotten.’17 Perhaps The String of Pearls arguably captured exactly the mood,
appetite and need for sensation and spectacle of the sort Dickens is here condemning, but
within the more acceptable framework provided through theatrical representation.
Crime in nineteenth-century melodrama often functions primarily as a narrative
device, one which helps to reveal what Peter Brooks refers to as moral legibility.18 By and
large the protagonists and antagonists of early melodrama exemplify virtue and vice, good
and evil, as clearly as the old morality plays. They show little psychological complexity or
ambiguity. Externals are all that matter, so much so that Brooks has drawn attention to the
semiotics and codifying principles of melodrama as evidence of its moral legibility – a
quality that he sees as almost Freudian in its tendency to make visible what we normally
submerge or repress. More recently Simon Shepherd has warned us not to assume that what is
unspoken in melodrama is insignificant: meaning is also implicit in silence and through
observation.19 One of the fundamental problems with Sondheim’s and his colleagues’
assessment of earlier stage adaptations is their assumption that what is not stated cannot be
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there. A critique of urban society is implicit in The String of Pearls, as is the power of
cannibalism as a metaphor for the predatory nature of class and capitalism. And Todd himself
assumes metaphorical and allegorical power in Pitt’s play precisely because he is undermotivated as a character, standing rather as an abstract for the greed, inhumanity and cruelty
at large in the urban centres of a newly-industrialised Britain.
Murderers fascinated the general public as much as they fascinated authors like
Dickens, who created a number of fictional killers, or actors like Macready, who attended
criminal trials to enhance through observation his capacity to play the role of killers on stage.
And in many ways The String of Pearls was the quintessential urban spectacle of pointless
murder and communal cannibalism, presenting in Sweeney Todd a nightmarish, amoral
figure who encapsulated the worst fears and the most destructive fantasies of his
contemporaries. Cannibalism itself provided the perfect metaphor for the time, for during the
nineteenth century
Increasing numbers of ordinary people – many of them empire-builders (secular or
religious) – found themselves far from hope, trapped in situations they were not
equipped for and could not control. Sometimes, they came face to horrified face with
genuine, practising cannibal tribes; sometimes they were lost or shipwrecked, and had
no choice other than to eat the dead or die themselves.20
If, as Sondheim suggests, ‘the true terror of melodrama comes from its revelations about the
frightening power of what is inside human beings’21, then his vision may arguably be closer
than he realises to that of Dibdin Pitt. Yet, in many ways, he sanitises the original.
Sondheim’s Sweeney is not a demon barber but a human being with an explainable thirst for
revenge. His version reduces the terrors and the Gothic qualities of the original. It gives a
motive for crime, when the horror of the original lies in Todd’s lack of psychological
complexity and lack of motivation. And, through their justifications for the changes they
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make, Sondheim, Bond and Prince both ignore and rewrite the past, cannibalising the stage
history of Sweeney Todd in the process.
The merit of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd as a piece of music theatre is not in
contention here. Nor is whether its setting should be abstract, historically specific or
historically unspecific. Rather, the key issue is the way in which justifications for the musical
seem to have necessitated a spurious pre-history of the play, sometimes inaccurate,
sometimes naïve, and implying that twentieth-century ‘sensibility’- for which read
‘motivation’ – has inevitably improved on the original. The purpose of this particular issue of
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film is not only to make Dibdin Pitt’s original adaptation of
The String of Pearls readily available for the first time, but also to correct such
misapprehensions.
1
Joseph Donohue, ed., The Cambridge History of British Theatre Volume 2 1660 to 1895
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Heidi J. Holder, ‘The East-End Theatre’, in
Kerry Powell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.269.
2
Daniel Gerould, ed., Melodrama (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980).
3
Robert Kimball in Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
(London: Nick Hern Books, 1991), p. xxxi.
4
‘Larger than Life: Reflections on Melodrama and Sweeney Todd’, in Gerould, p.5.
Sondheim’s biographer, Meryl Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life (London: Bloomsbury,
1998), p.290, dismisses the original as ‘a dreadful Victorian relic’.
5
In 1973 I travelled to the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, where I saw Brian Murphy perform
the title role in Sweeney Todd. It was a strong production and Murphy, ‘motivated’ or not,
gave to Sweeney the larger than life melodramatic edge that makes him both terrifying and
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inhuman. I have also witnessed several professional performances of the Sondheim musical.
Although this paper takes issue with some of Bond’s and Sondheim’s assertions about
melodrama and the original Sweeney Todd, it would be churlish not to concede that
Sondheim’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd and the melodramatic genre is a masterpiece of
music theatre, even if it is also a denial of much that melodrama and the original Sweeney
Todd represented.
6
Foster Hirsch, Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p.124 quotes Sondheim’s original Sweeney, Lou Cariou. ‘You have
to like a guy in order to play him…It’s easy to get behind a guy who’s been thrown in prison
for fifteen years for the wrong reasons.’ I doubt whether empathy or motivation troubled
earlier proponents of the role. An equally questionable assumption is the assertion that Mrs
Lovett was modelled on Brecht’s Mother Courage. See Thomas P. Adler, ‘The Sung and the
Said: Literary Value in the Musical Dramas of Stephen Sondheim’ in Sandor Goodhart,
Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York and London: Garland
Publishing Inc., 2000), p.42.
7
Gerould, p.6.
8
Ibid., p.11.
9
Hirsch, p.120.
10
Joanna Gordon, Art Isn’t Easy: The Theatre of Stephen Sondheim (New York: De Capo
Press, 1992), pp. 208-9.
11
‘George Dibdin Pitt: Actor and Playwright’, Theatre Notebook LII:1 (1998), 33.
12
p. 34.
13
Ibid, p. 36.
14
In Sondheim, Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street p. xxxii, Kimball also
refers to the influence of Hogarth.
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15
Secrest, p. 298, quoting William A. Henry III in Time.
16
Brenna, p. 36.
17
Quoted in Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (3rd edition, London: Macmillan, 1994),
p.237.
18
The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
19
‘Blood, Thunder and Theory: The Arrival of English Melodrama’, Theatre Research
International 24: ii (1999), 145-51.
20
Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex, (London: Abacus,
1975), p.190.
21
Gerould, p. 6.
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