Artistic
director Jonathan Church can once again look back on a Chichester
season that has deftly combined box-office appeal with just enough
adventurousness to keep both the more staid and the more radical
elements of his audience on board. The final in-house show of 2011
looks unlikely to be limited to a modest life on the south coast.
Jonathan Kent’s production is dark even by the standards of Stephen
Sondheim’s 1979 work, but it is the kind of darkness that mesmerises
and entices, that lures folk in suspense films into the shadows where
we know the slasher awaits.
The slasher
in this case is Michael Ball in the title role, almost unrecognisable,
his blond curls replaced by a lank curtain of dark hair, a saturnine
glower on his face. It is too easy to patronise Ball because of his
crossover appeal; he is a performer of both musical and theatrical
skill and commitment. Here, however, he is satisfied to regularly
donate the prime spot to Imelda Staunton as Mrs Lovett, above whose pie
shop Sweeney takes a room and whose bill of fare is soon enriched by
his victims. A couple of years ago in
Entertaining Mr Sloane,
Staunton gave what we then believed was full rein to her remarkable
ability to combine repulsion and fascination on her character’s part,
and grotesquerie and huggable playfulness in her appeal to spectators.
But how much more scope is given to that magic here: I defy anyone not
to be delighted, however much against their better judgement, by her
delivery of the stream of bad-taste Sondheimian rhyming in the Act One
finale, as she fantasises about pies filled with priest, lawyer, Royal
Marine and so on. Yet nor do Kent and his cast undersell the more
sombre theme that Sweeney and Lovett inhabit a callous world in which
man eats man and are merely giving this a literal twist.
Anthony
Ward’s design sets the action in a semi-derelict mid-20th-century
factory or warehouse, all wire-screen walls and folding steel-lattice
gates. I have some reservations about the vocal aspect: Sondheim’s
score is often deliberately discordant, but now and again some of the
more strident supporting voices seem to meld into a blare of
indistinguishable pitch. This may be a fault of the press-night sound
mix, or of the Festival Theatre’s acoustics, or simply of my ears. I
look forward to having a chance to re-evaluate the matter.
Written for the Financial
Times.