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London, in all its dreariness. Benjamin Barker, an upstanding barber of humble beginnings, is unjustly sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Turpin, who has his eye on Barker’s beautiful wife. Years later, Barker returns with only one thing on his mind: revenge. He learns from Mrs Lovett, the completely burnt-out but business-savvy owner of a meat-pie shop, that his wife has killed herself. And so Benjamin Barker, alias Sweeney Todd, not only embarks on an extremely efficient campaign of revenge, he also joins forces with his informant to start a flourishing joint venture in the meat-pie business …

The story of the ‘demonic barber of Fleet Street’ who became a mass murderer first appeared in 1846 as a penny dreadful entitled The String of Pearls, and has since served as the basis for numerous dramatic and cinematic adaptations. In composing this thriller musical, Sondheim drew inspiration from film soundtracks as well as Richard Wagner’s use of leitmotif. Barrie Kosky stages his vision of this classic musical as a ‘children’s theatre nightmare collage’, revelling in that lust for horror, wavering between disgust and laughter, that has always fascinated audiences.

He mercilessly digs into the question of what humans are capable of when they follow the logic of revenge to the bitter end, and what’s at stake in the process.

BY THE WAY

Cannibalism has featured in myths and fairy tales since antiquity: Chronos eats his children, Titus Andronicus bakes his dead enemies into pies, and the wicked witch intends to eat Hansel for dinner.

This is really not how Figaro and Susanna imagined the night before their wedding: not only is their new bedchamber right next to the rooms of their employer Count Almaviva, Susanna fears that he might even sneak in a claim to his droit du seigneur. But these are not the only intrigues in the House of Almaviva: old Bartolo seeks revenge against Figaro for thwarting his former plans to marry the Countess himself, and last but not least, the neglected Countess Rosina is concocting her own plans to bring her supposedly love-struck husband back in line.

By the way
After Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni will follow in 2025, thus completing Serebrennikov’s staging of Mozart’s Da Ponte trilogy.