Swing your razor wide: New Theatre’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Based on a nineteenth century penny dreadful, the story of Sweeney Todd, the ‘Demon Barber’ of Fleet Street, is the stuff of legend. Whilst a largely fictional character, he is often likened to Jack the Ripper as a figure whose mythology is larger than that of any real person from the time. First published in serial form in 1846-7 as The String of Pearls, a romance, the story was quickly adapted and appropriated into different mediums, with the name Sweeney becoming ubiquitous with that of a barber. A deliciously Victorian melodrama, it has captured the imaginations of millions across the world, including those of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler who adapted Christopher Bond’s play into their successful 1979 musical.

Playing at Newtown’s New Theatre, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the story of Todd, a man who is sentenced to life imprisonment in Australia under a trumped-up charge and makes his return to London, vowing vengeance upon those who removed him in the first place. Straight off the ship, he makes his way to his old stomping ground on Fleet Street, where he meets Mrs Lovett, a pie-maker with a failing business, and the result of their two devilish wits and cunning schemes is nothing short of, well, delicious. Written with panache and flair by Wheeler and Sondheim, the musical has a dark and lyrical momentum which keeps the story moving, as it combines a story of jealousy, love, horror, thrifty business. It is, by turn, a full-blooded melodrama, a Grand Guignol concoction of blood and hellish deeds, but also a pointed social commentary that is gripping, emotional and, at times, quite darkly funny.

Who’s afraid?: New Theatre’s Wolf Lullaby

Like so many other students, I first discovered Hilary Bell’s Wolf Lullaby at school. Set the task of designing a set and costumes for the play, we became engrossed in the hypnotic darkness, the encroaching claustrophobia which runs through so much of the play, and I think it was one of the first plays that made me think that maybe theatre was something I should consider spending my time on (pre-dating my Shakespeare-lightbulb-moment by about fifteen months.)

Currently playing at the New Theatre, it’s quite strange to see a play that you’ve got a history with performed in front of you, brought to life as it were. It’s like watching an old family story made real – you’ve seen or heard it so many times that you know exactly how it goes, but when it moves there’s just something about it which feels eversoslightly surreal, as though the lens isn’t right or the details are slightly blurry… I guess what I’m trying to articulate is that having studied it at school, having known it for nine years, the Wolf Lullaby in my head is naturally not the one others see, but it is still unmistakably Bell’s ‘Lullaby.’

Our town: New Theatre’s Book of Days

Set on a blank stage with a tree in the centre, New Theatre’s production of Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days could be forgiven for seeming, at first, to be rather empty. As Wilson’s play progresses and we come to know the small backwater town of Dublin, Missouri, we soon learn that it is anything but empty.

Wearing its influences on its sleeve, Book of Days was written in 2000, and owes much to Thornton Wilder’s seminal American play, Our Town, in tone and conceit. In Dublin, Missouri, where life revolves around the local cheese factory and the church, Ruth (book-keeper for the cheese factory) is chosen to play the lead role in Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. But, like all small towns, there is something dark lurking beneath the surface and, after an unfortunate accident during a tornado, Ruth takes it upon herself to try and uncover the truth, as the worlds of the local community and the theatre combine.

2013, the verdict

THEATRE

Event(s) of the Year Peter Pan; Forget Me Not – Belvoir Mrs Warren’s Profession – STC The Bull, The Moon and the Coronet of Stars – Griffin Henry 4 – Bell Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice – Sydney Shakespeare Company Songs with Orchestra – Lior & Nigel Westlake, with Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Honourable Mention Angels in America – Belvoir One Scientific Mystery, or Why Did The Aborigines Eat Captain Cook? – VHS Productions Rust and Bone – Griffin Summertime in the Garden of Eden – Griffin Bushpig – Bagabus inc (part of Sydney Fringe Festival) Top Girls – New Theatre
Best (New) Play Forget Me Not, Tom Holloway The Bull, The Moon and the Coronet of Stars, Van Badham One Scientific Mystery, or Why Did The Aborigines Eat Captain Cook?, Victoria Haralabidou Hinterland, Jane Bodie	The Flat Award Phédre – Bell Shakespeare Persona – Belvoir A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Bell Shakespeare Hamlet (with Toby Schmitz) – Belvoir
The Almost Award Jerusalem – New Theatre Return to Earth – Griffin	The ‘Love Me Tender’ Award Small and Tired – Belvoir
The Game-Changer Romeo and Juliet – STC

The Playlist: 2013 at the theatre

If you've followed my blog or read any of the theatre reviews throughout this year, you might have seen – at the bottom of the page – a song, numbered from 1 to 39. They form what I call ‘The Playlist,’ the idea being to find a piece of music that encapsulates either the production or my response to it (or sometimes both). Some selections may differ from those posted in the reviews; if so, it’s only because of a further reflection upon the production on my part. So here, altogether for the first time, is The Playlist for 2013.

Songs from the Wood: New Theatre’s Jerusalem

Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is a twenty-first century pastoral hymn to a mythic England, a country fast disappearing under the greedy clutches of urban sprawl and gentrification, and is filled with an anarchic sense of life and carpe diem, of grabbing life by the horns and riding it until it stops. Consider, then, that the play was written in 2009, and despite being the subject of four subsequent seasons in London’s West End and on Broadway, this is it’s Australian premiere production at Newtown’s New Theatre.

Jerusalem tells the story of Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, a man who has lived in his caravan in the Wiltshire forest for close to thirty-odd years, becoming in the meantime something of a local legend, a rite of passage, and a surrogate father-figure to many local teenagers in his time. But on the morning of April 23, St George’s Day, a reckoning has been heard – he has twenty-four hours to vacate the land he is squatting on, or risk forcible extraction and imprisonment.

Her-story: New Theatre's Top Girls

Written in 1982 when Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her game following the Falklands War, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls was an incendiary and urgent play about women in power, women with power, and women and power. Now, thirty-one years later, with Thatcher’s passing and the end of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership closer to home, Churchill’s play – revived here by New Theatre – seems almost prescient.

While Top Girls can (naturally) be considered to be a ‘period piece’, borne of the social and economic transformations brought about by Thatcher’s election, it is more than a mere foretelling of the 1980s; it is an ashamedly revealing work which shows with alarming accuracy just how little we have come as a society since that time, as Lyn Gardner wrote in The Guardian in 2002.