Next week, Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson will open in Sweeney Todd at English National Opera. They will be hard put to match the grisly glory of Bill Buckhurst’s staging for Tooting Arts Club. One of the most heartening theatrical stories of the past year, the production proves the importance of visionary producers. Rachel Edwards had the good wheeze of putting on Sondheim’s gory musical in the oldest pie and mash shop in London, Harrington’s in Tooting, and she raised the money. Sondheim went, admired and told Cameron Mackintosh about it. Mackintosh came up with idea of re-creating Harrington’s in Shaftesbury Avenue, where the music hits like a cleaver. Lots of mince. No mincing.
Spectators sit on benches at long tables, where they can have a pie. “Worst pies in London” is Mrs Lovett’s’s boast: they say these are lamb, but they could be toddler. Green-tiled walls are candlelit. Singers come so close, wielding cutlery, that you begin to fear you might be on the menu. The uncushioned acoustic underlines the cutting edge of the stripped-down orchestra: a clarinettist, a violinist and a waistcoated piano player with a good sideline in Victorian ballads. Jeremy Secomb and Siobhan McCarthy are particularly strong as Todd and Mrs Lovett, he with his tombstone face and she sinisterly romping. Each slit throat is announced by red light washing across the stage. A background sizzle announces that the ovens are alight. Or is that the sound of blood on the boil?
