Search

Saved articles

You have not yet added any article to your bookmarks!

Browse articles

GDPR Compliance

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing to use our site, you accept our use of cookies, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service.

Lovett

 
Rebecca Vines Review by Rebecca Vines 5 Published: 5 Aug 2025 Pleasance Courtyard Show Dates: 30 Jul 2025-25 Aug 2025

The legend of Sweeney Todd – the infamous ‘Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ – has been a staple of Gothic literature for nearly two centuries. First appearing in the Penny Dreadfuls of the early Victorian era, the bloodthirsty Todd and the epicurean entrepreneur Nellie Lovett are said to have terrorised and nourished London society in equal measure through their dastardly double act.

An extraordinarily powerful hour

In this origin piece, Lucy Roslyn imagines what might bring someone to Nellie’s eventual status as butcher to the establishment and feeder to the masses. Using the notorious story as a scaffold for wider social commentary, Roslyn conjures a world so simultaneously colourful and bleak that it is not hard to sympathise with the newly widowed Mrs Lovett as she searches for a way – any way – to survive.

It is an extraordinarily powerful hour. Roslyn is nothing short of hypnotic, infusing every syllable with a powerful longing for something more than the crappy hand life has dealt both her and pretty much every other 19th-century woman of limited means. Without sentiment or saccharine, we explore the choices (few) doled out to impoverished women of the day (many), and recalibrate our lofty, privileged understanding of lives lived so very far from the hedonistic, earnest, liberated echoes of the Pleasance Courtyard at play.

Roslyn conjures a world redolent with the whips and unforgiving scorns of Victorian London – and while perhaps less of a treat for the faint-hearted, the piece never strays into sensationalist or gratuitous territory. There is a delicacy in the gore, and a tenderness beneath the filth and grime smeared into Nellie – sorry, Eleanor’s – soul.

Roslyn is a spectacular physical performer, able to breathe life into a range of additional characters with that seemingly minimal effort which takes hours and hours to achieve. As an expert in her trade, Mrs Lovett rejoices in the beauty of precision and artistry. And Lucy Roslyn, in one of the most relentless, compelling pieces of work at the Fringe, is certainly no stranger to such mastery of her own commanding craft.

Related to this article:

Location:

Performances

The Blurb:

Newly-widowed Mrs Lovett needs to find a way to survive. Using skills learned from a whaler father, a courtesan mother and a butcher husband, Eleanor "recalibrates" her life - and her relationship with God. An origin story set before her infamous partnership with Sweeney Todd, we discover what would later lead her to turn pie-maker. You may think you already know Mrs. Lovett, but this new play explores what made her: the brutal choices and disappointments of a life in poverty. When the difference is life or death, morality becomes a moveable feast - and Eleanor is getting hungry...