Sweeney Todd: Moral Ambiguity Behind the Bloody Horror

If Sweeney Todd were merely about a barber cutting throats and a baker putting the bodies into pies, it would be an entertaining piece of bloody horror.

But it isn’t merely that.

The razors, corpses and suspiciously well-filled pastries are the show’s most memorable images, but they aren’t what makes this dark musical endure. Beneath the gore is a far more troubling story about injustice, revenge and the ease with which one can be mistaken for the other.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened on Broadway in 1979, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler. It was based on Christopher Bond’s 1973 play, which transformed an old murderous barber from Victorian melodrama into something more psychologically interesting. Bond gave Sweeney a tragic motive: revenge against the corrupt people and society that destroyed his life.

That changed everything.

Before he became Sweeney Todd, he was Benjamin Barker, a successful London barber with a wife, Lucy, and an infant daughter, Johanna. Judge Turpin wanted Lucy for himself, so he had Barker convicted on a false charge and transported to Australia.

Fifteen years later, Barker returns to London under his new name. He discovers that Turpin assaulted Lucy and took Johanna into his care. Believing his wife dead and finding his daughter effectively imprisoned by the same man, Sweeney turns to revenge.

At this point, the audience is with him.

Judge Turpin is corrupt, predatory and protected by the very legal system he represents. The law has already failed Sweeney. Worse, it was used against him. When he decides to punish Turpin himself, we understand why.

We may even want him to succeed.

That is where the moral ambiguity begins.

Sweeney has an authentic grievance. Something unforgivable was done to him and his family. Wanting the Judge to pay for it feels like justice, especially when there is no court willing to deliver it. The trouble is that revenge never stays within the boundaries Sweeney initially sets for it.

When his first opportunity to kill Turpin is interrupted, something inside him breaks. His rage spreads beyond the Judge and Beadle Bamford to encompass almost everyone. Any man who sits in his barber’s chair can become a substitute for the two men he truly wants.

The wronged man becomes a murderer of strangers.

Should that be the moment we abandon him?

It should be easy to say yes, but the musical makes it difficult. We have already travelled too far inside Sweeney’s grievance. We know what was taken from him, and the production keeps reminding us that his London is a cruel place where powerful people consume the powerless every day.

Sweeney simply makes that consumption literal.

Mrs Lovett helps him do it. She turns his victims into meat pies and sells them to an eager public. It is grotesque, practical and darkly funny. Her failing business flourishes, customers queue at the door, and murder becomes part of an efficient production line.

The original Broadway staging expanded this idea by placing the story within a huge iron foundry. Director Harold Prince saw industrial London as a machine that reduced people to workers, consumers and products. Sweeney and Lovett complete that cycle perfectly. Customers become bodies, bodies become pies and pies become profit.

Even so, Mrs Lovett cannot blame the system for everything she does.

She wants money, security and Sweeney. She knows Lucy is still alive but allows Sweeney to believe otherwise because the truth would destroy her imagined future with him. Her cheerful chatter and comic songs make her likeable, yet she is manipulating a damaged man for personal gain.

Sweeney thinks revenge will restore something that was stolen from him. Mrs Lovett thinks domestic happiness can be built over an oven filled with human remains.

Both mistake desire for justification.

That is what makes the musical darker than its bloodshed. Sweeney does not begin as an inexplicable monster. He becomes one through a sequence of choices that initially feel understandable. Each choice makes the next one easier until his original pursuit of justice has become indiscriminate slaughter.

By the time he finally kills Judge Turpin, the long-awaited revenge is almost meaningless. Sweeney has already destroyed innocent lives, narrowly avoided killing his own daughter and murdered the ragged beggar woman without recognising that she is Lucy.

He gets the man he wanted, but loses the reason he wanted him.

That is not a happy-ever-after. It is revenge completing its work.

This same moral instability interests me as a writer. My novel SEETHINGS is not about a murderous barber or human-filled pastries, but it also asks readers to stand uncomfortably close to someone whose sense of justice has become distorted.

In Sweeney Todd, revenge drives the narrative. In SEETHINGS, sexual frustration and the desire for relief provide the pressure. Five victims are discovered on nights of violent thunderstorms, and the darkness surrounding those deaths extends beyond blood and bodies.

The challenge is to make a reader understand the grievance without automatically approving the response.

That is where dark psychological fiction becomes interesting. It does not always provide a clean hero to support or an obvious villain to condemn. Instead, it offers a suitable counterpoint to an appalling act and waits to see whether we begin accepting a skewed kind of justice.

Sweeney Todd does exactly that.

The razor may draw the blood, but moral ambiguity makes us watch.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)

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