By Diane Parkes
When performer Meow Meow was offered the role of Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at Birmingham Rep, she initially hesitated, unsure of whether it was the right time to step into the show’s darkly comic world of murderous revenge.
But the more she thought about it, the more she realised the story has a powerful resonance for audiences today.
“When they first asked me, I thought, ‘Do I want to be doing something right now that is so bloody?’ I mean, at points it is just glorying in the gothic horror and I didn’t know if the world needs that right now,” she says.
“And then I thought about it more and more and thought, ‘Well, it really is a morality tale and that is something the world needs.’ If the world can’t see what is happening in real life then we’d better do it in a theatre and make it live.”
And so Meow Meow will play Mrs Lovett alongside Ramin Karimloo as Sweeney and David Bedella as Judge Turpin in the show directed by Birmingham Rep artistic director Joe Sweeney, which plays the theatre from next month.
Written by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd premiered on Broadway in 1979 and has been staged in numerous productions in theatres across the world ever since.
It tells the story of Benjamin Barker, who is wrongfully sent to a penal colony by Judge Turpin, who is lusting after his wife and daughter. When Barker returns to London he is bent on revenge. Changing his name to Sweeney Todd, he sets up a barber shop – but when he pairs up with his neighbour Mrs Lovett, the two embark on a new business venture. As Sweeney cuts the throats of his customers, Mrs Lovett bakes them into meat pies.
It may all be fantastical but, says Meow Meow, there is a lot of truth in the characters and their adventures.
“I’m always trying to do work that is relevant to a contemporary audience and Sweeney feels very relevant in contemporary society. Yes, it’s a wonderfully gothic bloody tale but at its heart it’s really about love and revenge, blind obsession and survival. It’s also magnificent musically. And hilarious.
“It’s an awe-inspiring piece. We seem to be in a society which is in cycles of revenge that blind us to all sorts of love and so this feels right on the money right now.”
Meow Meow has built up a formidable reputation for her genre-defying international career, featuring the creation of original award-winning music-theatre works and concerts. As a frequent collaborator with the orchestra Pink Martini, she has appeared at the Hollywood Bowl and the Berlin Philharmonie. Her own concerts have filled Royal Festival Hall, Sydney Opera House and, recently, a sold-out Carnegie Hall debut.
In the UK she has appeared in plays including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Globe, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in the West End, and Guys and Dolls at the Royal Albert Hall. She is also a guest artist with the Pina Bausch Dance Company in Wuppertal, Germany.
Meow Meow says a character like Mrs Lovett is irresistible.
“For her, is it just about survival? Bertolt Brecht has that great expression, ‘First comes food, then comes morality,’ and I think with Mrs Lovett we are dealing with the desperation of survival. She does what she needs to in order to survive. And then, of course, there is love.
“So I think there is fun to be had with the character but it’s also about getting to the kernel of who that woman is and what has happened to make her who she is and what is happening to her now.”
For Meow Meow, many of the clues to Mrs Lovett’s character come from Sondheim’s music.
“There is a constant babbling current which runs through Mrs Lovett’s music, which I think is her brain, but then there is also this hyper-focus.
“There’s that wonderful dissonance which carries through Sondheim’s music, so there’s this lovely light, deft trilling all over the place, but then there is this stunning subliminal drive. I think when you are playing her character you take from the music as well as the text.”
The character of Sweeney Todd originated in a Victorian penny dreadful called The String of Pearls and, for Meow Meow, the story’s source gives the characters a certain hallmark.
“Those early penny dreadfuls are folk tales that have been co-opted by writers who have reinterpreted them,” she says. “They have got all the layers of those myths and folk tale characters that have a kind of symbolism about them.
“It’s a bit like Punch and Judy. It’s got that feel of really old plays – The Judge, The Church, The State, The Fallen Woman – they are all the archetypes of very simplistic folk plays, and indeed Commedia dell’Arte. But then add into this the psychological dramas, so we keep that folk story element but with the fleshiness of the characters.
“And I feel the strains of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and the influence of Brecht and Weill all over everything.
“What I like is that on the one hand the show is sort of heightened Grand Guignol horror mixed with a kind of old-school music hall comedy. That comedy is as dark as the desperate times it reveals, and yet it pulls us out of the darkness, as it were, with laughter and beauty to examine the frailty of human morality.”
Sweeney Todd is Meow Meow’s first time performing at Birmingham Rep.
“I feel honoured and lucky to be, I hope, part of the tradition of this theatre,” she says. “Through the decades it has continued to be this quite epic breeding ground of talent and experimentation, and it is a wonderful thing to be part of.
“It depends on the age of people I am talking to but when I say Birmingham Rep, they might say Laurence Olivier or someone else but regardless they’ve got someone from their generation who had a significant time there.
“And there is a real sense of vibrancy and a real buzz of creativity around this show. To be in a place where, against all odds, they are creating large-scale work in a time of financial crisis is exciting.”
She has one other reason for being keen to come to the city – Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s priceless collection of Pre-Raphaelite art.
“I love the Pre-Raphaelites and I know there is a great collection in Birmingham,” she says. “I passed through the city before and did go to the gallery but it was closed, so I’m looking forward to seeing them now. I find those works very moving because there is incredible beauty but there is also coded spirituality and morality in those paintings. I like things that on their surface look one thing but then you look and see more. A bit like Sweeney, really.
“So when I have a moment when I am not learning how to cook pies I am going to be saturating myself in long red-headed maidens and images of agony and morality.”
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street plays Birmingham Rep between 4th July and 15th August. See www.birmingham-rep.co.uk for more details and tickets.