Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is thus part of a long tradition of depicting the murderous barber on stage, although the version most people are likely to be familiar with nowadays is Tim Burton’s 2007 film of the same name, starring Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd and Helena Bonham Carter as his pie-making assistant Mrs. Such was the popularity of the stories that the first theatrical performance of The String of Pearls was staged even before the serial had come to its conclusion.
Most probably written by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, the story of bloody murder and cannibalism first appeared in serialised form as The String of Pearls (1846-7), a ‘penny blood’, the graphic predecessor to the meeker ‘penny dreadful’ stories. Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is not for the faint-hearted, it has fascinated audiences for a century and a half in all of its different media incarnations.
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