Before there were pies, there was hunger. Before there was Sweeney Todd, there was Eleanor. Lucy Roslyn’s gripping solo show slices into the myth of Mrs Lovett and serves up something far more nourishing than the usual penny dreadful caricature.
We meet Eleanor in a dark cellar, her knife glinting like a conspirator’s wink. Treat your blades well she says, sharpen and hone because butchery is an art in undoing God’s work.
This is a woman shaped by survival – the whaler father who taught her to cut, the courtesan mother who taught her to charm, and the butcher husband who taught her the finesse of the block.
Recently widowed she looks back on a marriage of companionship, no waves, but a trade. Now it is time to “recalibrate”, including her relationship with an absent God. Threaded through her tale is a sharp-eyed reckoning with religion, her faith is more rhetorical weapon than spiritual anchor. Bible verses spill from her lips, sometimes with a bitter twist, reflecting her deep distrust of those who claim to speak for it. Her morality is shaped not by doctrine but by the brutal calculus of survival.
What follows is a tale of poverty, desire, envy, vengeance, and moral erosion, played out against the unforgiving backdrop of Victorian London. From the paupers’ graveyards of Southwark to the cramped shopfronts of Fleet Street, Roslyn draws us into a world where morality is negotiable, hunger is constant, and the line between necessity and cruelty blurs. She feels trapped like a penned animal, entreating to be let out, or perhaps to unleash something far darker within.
It’s into this hard-won, self-forged existence that a young, magnetic barber named Sweeney Todd strides in an encounter that sets flint to steel crackling with instant, dangerous chemistry,
Roslyn’s Eleanor is as precise in her movements as she is in her storytelling, conjuring a cast of vivid characters – friends, lovers, abusers, rivals – with the ease of a quick flick of the wrist. The performance is hypnotic, physical command controlled yet seething with undercurrents, blood and gore hinted at rather than splattered and offset by moments of unexpected tenderness.
It’s a masterful piece, but at times the narrative is less sharp, leaving moments of ambiguity that slightly cloud an otherwise vivid portrait. The direction is taut and uncluttered while the sound design adds a subtle undercurrent.
This is theatre as character archaeology – digging beneath the folklore to find the living, breathing woman who might one day make those pies.
A darkly comic origin story – and a feast for fans of compelling solo performance.
Show Times: 30 July to 25 August 2025 at 12.30pm. (Captioned 13).
Tickets: £10, £14 (£13) to £15 (£14).
Suitability: 14+ (Note – show contains the use of haze and weapon props).