Sweeney Todd Play Quotes

[The Greeks] went to the open-air theatre expecting the drama they saw to evoke terror and pity. Nowadays we have enough terror and pity in our own lives and so rather than going to the theatre looking for terror, we go looking for slight irritation. And rather than looking for the theatre to evoke pity, we look merely for a generalized sense of identification as in “Evita was a woman, I am a woman." Or “Sweeney Todd was a barber, I go to the hairdresser." Or “Fosca in Passion should have her moles removed, I know a good dermatologist." That sort of thing.

In the original production, after the first factory whistle, almost the entire cast appeared onstage to sing the opening song, the first words of which are, “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” (F 333).44 These words immediately establish that what we are to see over the next two and a half hours is not the story of Sweeney Todd but the narration of the story of Sweeney Todd, presumably by the actors assembled on the stage.45 That we are watching a narration, a performance, is reinforced by the periodic reprises of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” that assist the transitions between scenes and comment on the action. This emphasis of the storytelling aspect of the play, its narrativity, gains importance if we recall some of the connections between narrative and time discussed in the section on Company. Narratives, because of their connection to time’s arrow, move toward death. The desire for completed narrative-epistemological structures implies specifically a desire for death and, more generally, a desire for the transcendent, the ideal, absolutes that exist outside the completed structures and, implicitly, outside of time.