The panto season has arrived early at Perth, where director Graham McLaren has returned to the 1846 story of Sweeney Todd to create a Victorian melodrama infused with the values of penny-dreadful exploitation. His model is the gothic flamboyance of Improbable Theatre's Shockheaded Peter, but his tone sits uneasily between thriller and comedy. The result is a 90-minute show too vulgar to be straight drama and too tame to be another Rocky Horror.
His best move is to bring in Michael Marra, who, with two fellow musicians in white face paint and bowler hats, takes on the Tiger Lillies role with a soundtrack of piano, trumpet and accordion. The gravel-voiced singer finds himself somewhere between Kurt Weill and Tom Waits, his score capturing the raw danger of a lawless London.
An ashen-faced Kevin McMonagle is a fine fit for the lead role, his hair lank and posture stooping as he scurries about McLaren's three-storey tenement set. Rather than the ruthless serial killer of history, he is a mild-mannered social misfit whose barber-shop murders begin with an honourable crime of passion before escalating with the warped logic of black farce. As Mrs Lovett, Gabriel Quigley has a bossy authority, filling her pies with Todd's corpses and setting the gruesome agenda like a Lady Macbeth.
The combination of gore and Shakespeare recalls Jarry's Ubu plays, in which the Macbeth-style monarchs delight in their murderous march to power. It is a comparison that does The Demon Barber no favours. For all the fountains of blood and fingers literally in pies, the play is too timid to be iconoclastic. If it had been funnier you could have enjoyed the camp excess, but, lacking a satirical target, the show is as decadent as it is aimless.
· Until November 24. Box office: 0845 612 6332.
