Meet Todd
Sweeney Todd, “the Demon Barber of Fleet Road” is a assassin who preys on his prospects and offers their corpses to Mrs. Lovett, his accomplice in crime, to bake their flesh into meat pies. His barber store is on Fleet Road, London, subsequent to St. Dunstan’s church, and is related to Lovett’s pie store in close by Bell Yard by way of an underground passage. Todd has a mechanical chair to get rid of his victims, dropping them via a trapdoor to the cellar under. If they’re nonetheless alive, he goes right down to the basement to complete them off along with his straight razor.
The story is as a lot about man-feasting-on-man as it’s in regards to the horrors of industrialization, the place individuals might legitimately disappear because of a rising crime price and the rising anonymity of the typical employee. Todd was a part of a custom of barber-surgeons, medical practitioners who discovered the artwork of discipline surgical procedure by apprenticeship. A barber’s ability with razors meant they had been way more palms on than physicians of the day, with providers starting from bloodletting to enamel pulling.
The concept of a murderous barber who turns victims into meals goes again so far as the seventeenth century, within the journal of the Swedish traveler Pehr Lindestrom. The story picks up steam in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, which references cats getting used as elements in meat pies after which later, in Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, a stray point out of “evil geniuses” who flip individuals into cannibalistic pastries.
The terrifying story was ultimately codified in a penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls, revealed two years later, which gave the demon barber his identify: Sweeney Todd.
From Ebook to Stage to Movie
Sweeney Todd’s transformation from a gothic horror story to a melodrama was an evolution, with every of his theatrical appearances constructing on the one earlier than. Probably the most iconic in America is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Road by Stephen Sondheim, a musical that debuted in 1979. This model of Sweeney Todd’s story (impressed by Christopher Bond’s play in 1970) makes him extra sympathetic: he’s Benjamin Barker, wrongfully convicted by Choose Turpin. Turpin, in a relentless pursuit of Barker’s spouse Lucy, creates false fees to ship Barker to an Australian penal colony, then takes benefit of her, driving her mad, and adopting Barker’s daughter Johanna. When Barker returns, he takes on a vengeful guise as Sweeney Todd and, with the encouragement of the native landlady Mrs. Lovett, concocts a scheme to get rid of the our bodies of his bloody rampage by baking them into pies.
However Todd’s plans to homicide the Choose and the beadle liable for his spouse and kid’s destiny are sophisticated by the truth that he’s poisoned with a hatred of the world. When Turpin slips via his grasp, Todd bides his time as he searches for Johanna, murdering the itinerant to fund his and Lovett’s enterprise. And enterprise is booming, as Mrs. Lovett’s pies are made with actual meat when such a delicacy was onerous to search out throughout the industrialized revolution.
Watching the play is an expertise. The characters sing and speak over one another, the musical rating is a continuing companion, and Mrs. Lovett (performed within the unique by Angela Lansbury) is a deal with as she tries to justify, with hard-nosed realism, that in powerful occasions homicide is suitable … and baking disagreeable individuals into pies is okay if it makes some cash.
Sweeney Todd was memorably become a film in 2007 that includes Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, and Alan Rickman as Choose Turpin. That was hardly the primary manufacturing; followers of Victorian horror motion pictures is not going to be stunned to be taught that the notorious Tod Slaughter performed Sweeney Todd in 1936.
In Fantasy Campaigns
The weather of Sweeney Todd present every part for a villain in his lair: a mechanical lure, an confederate, and a veneer of respectability. The play continuously references how he serves “a darkish and vengeful god” and so he might simply be a Pact of the Blade warlock who makes use of a straight razor. He may be a bard (charming his victims into compliance) or a rogue (utilizing his sneak assault to chop throats). If steampunk know-how is frequent in your fantasy marketing campaign, the demon barber may even be an artificer who has complicated barber’s instruments and harmful chairs to restrain victims earlier than disposing of them.
Some video games select to interpret the “demon barber” actually as a fiend. A reskinned chain satan from the core guidelines (who animates razors as a substitute of chains) will work, as will as relentless slasher from Van Richten’s Information to Ravenloft. Kobold Press’ Tome of Beasts has a vile barber who’s a fey with a collection of powers that make it troublesome to catch.
No matter their powers, the demon barber’s lair ought to be as a lot of a problem as he’s, with trapdoors, a bake home (that smells vile), and naturally his ally Mrs. Lovett, who transforms corpses into meals — maybe a transmutation wizard of some kind. Between them, they may problem mid-tier events who examine the disappearance of strangers in a big metropolis.
