Sweeney Todd: Fringe Theatre's Razor-Edge Revolt

Front Row Centre Players are staging Sweeney Todd at the Pumphouse Theatre from the 16th to the 31st of May. The play has won several Tony Awards and has come to be seen as a part of the UK’s high-art stage canon and has transitioned into becoming an important cultural opera, underscoring themes of revenge, the corruption of institutional power and cannibalism as social metaphor. The story follows Benjamin Barker, wrongfully convicted and exiled by the corrupt Judge Turpin, coveting a desire for Barker’s wife. Barker, driven by revenge and madness, conspires with Mrs. Lovett, murdering his clients (acting as a barber) and turning them into sumptuous meat pies. The dark pursuit of justice eventually leads to Barker mistakenly murdering his wife and his own death at the hands of a child he protected. The theme of revenge is particularly compelling in this play, Barker’s exaction of justice is redolent of Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment, (vengefulness that results from powerlessness). Barker’s existence has been violated by Judge Turpin, moral frameworks are now inverted because Barker has witnessed first-hand the brutal arbitrariness and hypocrisy of a broken judicial system. He redefines morality to make his weakness a strength and to render his enemies as ‘evil’. This is a man who’s life has been annihilated by the untrammeled and leviathan like power of the State, he sees no recourse in the very system that claimed to administer justice, only the machinery of brutal domination.  Barker, after having served his sentence, does not build his identity around freedom, but around retribution. After having been hurtled into the abyss of injustice, he does not climb out of it, in fact, he becomes it. The irony is that he replicates Judge Turpin’s judicial perversion, he perpetuates Turpin’s structure by engaging in indiscriminate murder and justifying it as justice. Baker’s line, ‘they all deserve to die’, is a sacrificial ideology where everyone around him becomes a stand-in for the original perpetrator. Through a psychoanalytical reading, Barker’s worldview projects rage onto the generalized other. The full force of the original trauma is unbearable and unassimilable, the projection of this trauma onto everyone around him allows him to retain his agency. The projection becomes a defensive structure, allowing him to retain a semblance of who he is, not as a healed subject but as a homicidal agent whose murderous rituals shield him from ontological disintegration.  For anyone interested in jurisprudence and the poetics of legal-institutional reasoning Barker’s barber blade (through which he slits the throats of his victims) is a potential representations of the law’s violent sovereignty – coercive, final and unaccountable. Whatever one’s foundational conception of the law is, there is no doubt that the law very often takes on thanatocratic (rule through death) properties, where law is preserved not to rejuvenate and protect life, but to enact domination through violence and ritualized death (excommunication & exile), a form of necrolegalism where the law sustains its authority through the decimation of life and human dignity.  What is worse? The thanatocratic perversion of Turpin or the homicidal rage of Barker? An argument could be made that the former creates repressed subjects, deracinated from their humanity and stripped of the very qualities that make them functioning social subjects, and it does so in ways that are particularly malevolent and depraved. That being said Barker’s violence is not sublimated to the achievement of legitimate social ends, it does not purify or liberate, but on the contrary, like Judge Turpin, has become a necrotic exercise in acting as the sovereign of death. This is a tragic doubling, where the hero and the villain become interchangeable. It is a monstrous inheritance where the repressed inherit the logic of their enemy. There are more than enough historical and contemporary conflicts that underscore the stubborn perpetuity of this logic. The French reign of terror, Stalin’s purges, Guantanamo Bay are all egregious examples of this tragic doubling. My contentious thesis though, is that Judge Turpin and Benjamin Barker’s epitomization of evil pale in comparison to Mrs. Lovett. She is the smiling face of systemic evil and is the logical manager of death, par excellence, in this play. With bureaucratic astuteness, she plans and manages the destruction of Barker’s clients - monetizing their bodies into meat pies. With a managerial acuity redolent of the feared Einsatzengruppen (Nazi functionaries), she takes immense pride in her logistical acumen. Her evil is not overt, it is hidden in domesticity and in making ends meet. She is the baker of bureaucratized horror, so morally evacuated that her atrocities become routinized and mundane tasks. She has naturalized the horror of murder into everyday life. She denies suffering by rationalizing and consuming it. In the words of Primo Levi (holocaust survivor), “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” What is truly grotesque about Mrs. Lovett is that we never see any minor moral reservations, there are moments where she exhibits affection, but it all seems like the mechanical contrivance of someone performing a well-rehearsed social script. Barker’s homicidal excess is an embodiment of trauma as justification, but Lovett’s evil is purely administrative, not existential. Barker may have believed in a moral order, his rage assumes that it has been broken, this question no longer matters to Lovett, she lives in a state of brutal aloofness from it.

The play abounds with motifs of the sacred – there are rituals, there are sacrifices, and there is even devotion, but there is no transcendence. The play operates as a black mass (I do not mean this pejoratively), the stage operates in some ways (metaphor) as a desecrated cathedral, the barbers chair is an altar, the razor a sacrificial blade. In this world there is no transcendence or atonement, only entropy. The cannibalism of Barker’s victims, made into pies, is as an inversion of the eucharist. It is emblematic of the modern age, replacing the divine signifier with a well-run system, with egoic appetites and instrumental reason. Ritual becomes logistics, all thrust towards monetizing human suffering through revenue generating imperatives.  

What is the relevance of Sweeney Todd in today’s world? Does the play matter?  Yes. Sweeney Todd is a subject in collapse, he is every human being who has no language for pain, he only has the capacity to engage in ritualized violence. In this dramatic ecosystem, his agency has been stripped by the necrotic appetite of venal and aloof institutions, ones that exist in abstraction from his lived reality. Despair and violence become a shared liturgy for broken people in such a world – Sweeney Todd’s self-annihilation may require us to ask, not, what is wrong with these individuals but what world makes these rituals necessary. The dynamic between Barker & Lovett, profound rage and pain fused with structural aloofness mirrors the synthesis behind modern violence – human suffering is absorbed in impersonal structures that negate the sacredness of life, all that is recognized is its functionality and utility. That being said, even in these circumstances, there always exists the potential for individuals to make ethically determined choices. To dis-acknowledge this would be a catastrophic doubling of institutional indifference, sealing human suffering inside the abstractions that first created it.

To the play – I am absolutely stunned by the collective tenacity and fortitude of Lindsay Kurtze (Director), Jenn Lanciault (producer) and Minh Badau (Associate Producer), and the broader production team; to put up an amateur production of this breadth must have been nothing less than a herculean task. This play, right from the start to the end, is a panoply of efficient performances, intelligently orchestrated music, evocative singing, tasteful lighting, an interesting set and well-designed costumes. This is one of the BEST plays I have seen over the last 8 months, far outpacing even professional productions, by virtue of its solid grounding in dramatic presence, performative conviction and thoughtful direction. To do all of this with a shoestring budget, and with nothing but the ardor and passion of people who love the craft is, to be frank, fucking outstanding. Mike Sornberger, playing Sweeney Todd, was dark and poignant, effusing the gravitas and torture of a character wracked by tumult and vengeance. He never overplayed the character, which is always a temptation in a musical like this but performed with the requisite restraint and performative economy that a difficult character like this requires. Boden Broadhead, playing Anthony Hope, played with innocence and charm, infusing ebullient energy into a macabre dramatic environment, his character refracts the dramatic ecology through the lens of tenebrism, ensuring that there is an intense contrast between light and dark. His character embodies the hope that love can rehabilitate degraded social environments, that it possesses a radical social energy that can uplift people and communities from nihilistic squalor. Krista Willott as Mrs. Lovett was voltaic, charging the stage with powerful energy and conviction, her on-stage chemistry with Mike Sornberger was outstanding, her confidence was magnetic. Charlie Schaffner, as Tobias Ragg, played with efficiency. Brad Simon as Judge Turpin played the cantankerous and lecherous Judge with quirky poise. Kevann Carter as the Beggar Woman was convincing. Jillian Hannah, playing Johanna, exhibited impressive vocal strength, singing with delicate and powerful nuance. Kerrick Chavarria, playing Adolfo Pirelli, was confident and convincing. Chris Willott as the beadle was excellent, his performance exemplified impressive assuredness and razor-sharp presence on stage. What was particularly compelling about this production was the use of an ensemble, acting as a contemporary Greek chorus, operating as an ambient conscience, a perceptual field for the interpretation of the moral weight of the drama. Their use of mobile phones to illuminate their faces may have served a dual function, to read the lyrics, but also serving a symbolic function – Each member of the ensemble exists as isolated, cold and spectral entities, the act of digital illumination underscored a deeper metaphysical severance. Just as Todd’s barber chair becomes a device of estrangement, the phone too becomes a device of estrangement. Here, the light of the screen serves functionality, not feeling, precisely reflecting the shattered subjectivity of Sweeney Todd. Our phones, like the chorus, process the horror of the modern world without the means to transform it. The use of the ensemble was brilliant and creative, evoking the sense that we are all witnesses to tragedies around us, unable to directly intervene in the events around us, complicit in the passivity of the digital consumption of human suffering. The ensemble presence centripetalizes the performances of the actors on stage through distinct thematic movements, ensuring that younger or less skilled actors are protected under the canopy of the collective. This is, both, smart and resourceful. The music, led by Anne Roggensack & Joanne Sampson, and the band were brilliant, layering the scenes with psycho-sonic energy that, both, augmented and heightened the performances of the actors. The band carved out the emotional terrain of the play with atmospheric finesse. The lighting, Kathryn McLaren, was intelligent and thoughtful, ensuring that the Mise-en-scène was charged with colors and hues that underscored the emotional architecture of the play. The on-stage management was crisp and sharp, Cheyenne Cranston, evidencing meticulous preparation. The costume design for an amateur production, Yvonne Ustick, was good, focusing on costumes that complemented the psycho-social profile of the characters. The direction, Lindsay Kurtze, was outstanding. To harmonize all of these performances and production elements into a thematically unified and cohesive presentation is a testament to how far directors will go if they are obsessed and fanatical enough about putting something memorable up. This is a level and brand of conviction that I have not seen enough of in this ecosystem, an artistic audacity that is not afraid of embracing risk. THIS is the kind of vision that gives theatre its power and its relevance. This polemical critic tips his hat to Lindsay Kurtze.

Some issues with the production – the audibility of the actors, it is hard to hear them over the music. For professional productions this would be a fatal flaw. For an amateur production, it is entirely forgivable. This is a purely subjective opinion, but I would have liked the production to have fleshed out some of the darker elements in the play. This play is many ways a grimoire of sorts and the dark inversion of some of the symbolic motifs in the play could have been explored. Putting a thematic accent on the infernal liturgy would have made the horror not just visible, but deeply visceral. This would have let the audience feel, and not just observe, the black mass that lies at the heart of Sweeny Todd’s world. Enunciating the ritualized entropy that pulsates through this world would have raised the stakes for the audience. This is why the production comes across as ‘cute’ at times and loses its macabre edge.

That being said, it is plays like these that throw the gauntlet down to professional theatre. They quite convincingly show us that the distinctions between what is professional, and amateur is at best a difference in the resources available to them. In terms of courage, tenacity, and integrity – from what I am seeing, some amateur productions are steaming ahead, well ahead of professional productions. The latter have become content with phoning it in and confusing sterility for tradition. Whatever professionals may think of amateur productions, the best of them burn with the raw force of necessity and intent, and unlike professional productions, do not mistake empty polish for power, or social marketing for quality. High budgets are not always needed to yield high concepts, quite the opposite as this production shows us.

My heart is happy with this production. I walked out of the hall saying, “Fuck yeah.” Because this-this-is what theatre is: risk, spirit, and absolute vulnerability.

Bravo!

Rating – 8/10