We recently saw a fantastic performance of Sweeney Todd, but the show’s roots run much deeper than Broadway.
Meet Todd
Sweeney Todd, “the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” is a murderer who preys on his customers and gives their corpses to Mrs. Lovett, his partner in crime, to bake their flesh into meat pies. His barber shop is on Fleet Street, London, next to St. Dunstan’s church, and is connected to Lovett’s pie shop in nearby Bell Yard by means of an underground passage. Todd has a mechanical chair to dispose of his victims, dropping them through a trapdoor to the cellar below. If they are still alive, he goes down to the basement to finish them off with his straight razor.
The story is as much about man-feasting-on-man as it is about the horrors of industrialization, where people could legitimately disappear thanks to a rising crime rate and the increasing anonymity of the average worker. Todd was part of a tradition of barber-surgeons, medical practitioners who learned the art of field surgery by apprenticeship. A barber’s skill with razors meant they were far more hands on than physicians of the day, with services ranging from bloodletting to teeth pulling.
The idea of a murderous barber who turns victims into food goes back as far as the 17th century, in the journal of the Swedish traveler Pehr Lindestrom. The tale picks up steam in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, which references cats being used as ingredients in meat pies and then later, in Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, a stray mention of “evil geniuses” who turn people into cannibalistic pastries.
The terrifying tale was eventually codified in a penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls, published two years later, which gave the demon barber his name: Sweeney Todd.
From Book to Stage to Film
Sweeney Todd’s transformation from a gothic horror story to a melodrama was an evolution, with each of his theatrical appearances building on the one before. The most iconic in America is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondheim, a musical that debuted in 1979. This version of Sweeney Todd’s story (inspired by Christopher Bond’s play in 1970) makes him more sympathetic: he is Benjamin Barker, wrongfully convicted by Judge Turpin. Turpin, in a relentless pursuit of Barker’s wife Lucy, creates false charges to send Barker to an Australian penal colony, then takes advantage 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 local landlady Mrs. Lovett, concocts a scheme to dispose of the bodies of his bloody rampage by baking them into pies.
But Todd’s plans to murder the Judge and the beadle responsible for his wife and child’s fate are complicated by the fact that he is poisoned with a hatred of the world. When Turpin slips through his grasp, Todd bides his time as he searches for Johanna, murdering the itinerant to fund his and Lovett’s business. And business is booming, as Mrs. Lovett’s pies are made with real meat when such a delicacy was hard to find during the industrialized revolution.
Watching the play is an experience. The characters sing and talk over each other, the musical score is a constant companion, and Mrs. Lovett (played in the original by Angela Lansbury) is a treat as she tries to justify, with hard-nosed realism, that in tough times murder is acceptable … and baking unpleasant people into pies is fine if it makes some money.
Sweeney Todd was memorably turned into a movie in 2007 featuring Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, and Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin. That was hardly the first production; fans of Victorian horror movies will not be surprised to learn that the infamous Tod Slaughter played Sweeney Todd in 1936.
In Fantasy Campaigns
The elements of Sweeney Todd provide everything for a villain in his lair: a mechanical trap, an accomplice, and a veneer of respectability. The play frequently references how he serves “a dark and vengeful god” and so he could easily be a Pact of the Blade warlock who uses a straight razor. He could also be a bard (charming his victims into compliance) or a rogue (using his sneak attack to cut throats). If steampunk technology is common in your fantasy campaign, the demon barber might even be an artificer who has complex barber’s tools and dangerous chairs to restrain victims before disposing of them.
Some games choose to interpret the “demon barber” literally as a fiend. A reskinned chain devil from the core rules (who animates razors instead of chains) will work, as will as relentless slasher from Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft. Kobold Press’ Tome of Beasts has a vile barber who is a fey with a suite of powers that make it difficult to catch.
Whatever their powers, the demon barber’s lair should be as much of a challenge as he is, with trapdoors, a bake house (that smells vile), and of course his ally Mrs. Lovett, who transforms corpses into food — perhaps a transmutation wizard of some sort. Between them, they might challenge mid-tier parties who investigate the disappearance of strangers in a large city.
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