Our Oct ’25 talk featured a tour around the legend of Sweeney Todd. The story has been around since 1846 with many creative versions since. The character of Sweeney Todd is fictional, not real as some believe. Fay summarised some of the many productions as follows:
1936 – A black and white film with the actor Todd Slaughter playing Sweeney Todd
1959 – A Royal /Ballet Sweeney Todd with music by Sir Malcolm Arnold
1979 – A Stephen Sondheim version with music and songs, the first production on Broadway. There were over 500 performances of this production.
2011 – Chichester Festival Theatre production (1930’s setting), with Imeda Staunton and Michael Ball in the lead roles.
2025 – Film called Slice and Dice , 80 mins.
There is also a Two Ronnies version on You Tube.
The story first appeared in the Peoples Periodical and Family Library, priced at 1d for 8 pages of often melodramatic stores published by Edward Lloyd. There were several of this type of periodical labelled Penny Dreadfuls. Plagiarism often featured e.g. Barnaby Budge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Penny Pickwick, Nicklaus Nickleby, Olive Twiss. Cannibalism was a familiar feature of these stories and had its roots in the middle/upper class fear of crime from the urban poor or underclass. A French satirical print of 1792 (in British Museum) illustrated this fear.
The origins of the story of Sweeney Todd appear in a story called A String of Pearls (1847 Romance). Possible authors were James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Pickett who wrote for Lloyd’s periodical in 1846-47. The stories always ended with a hook line to keep readers interested in the next episode. The String of Pearls were a gift which never reached their intended recipient because of Sweeney Todd’s murder of the messenger Todd tries to pawn the Pearls, is arrested and carted off to jail and eventually hanged in this version of the tale. There is an 1847 playbill for The String of Pearls play which was a great success and an expanded story published as a book in 1752 and another heavily illustrated version in 1850. Sweeney Todd appears obsessed with getting rich which reflected an increasingly greedy society.
In 1973 there was a London (Stratford) production played as a revenge tale where Sweeney is sent to a penal colony in Australia. The macabre tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber, is up with the horror stories of Frankenstein and Dracula.
On a final note Fay mentioned an English bakery in Turkey called Mrs Lovett’s Bakery featuring meat pies, hopefully of the non-cannibalised variety!
With this amusing footnote, Fay ended a very entertaining and informative history of the macabre tale of Sweeney Todd.
Lois Coulthart