The great news is that Michael Ball, best known for cosy campery, is now tremendous in the title role. His fleshy, pallid face and lank dark forelock create an instant shiver, he has a splendidly brooding stage presence and the moment when he flips from a man with a legitimate grievance into a deranged psychopathic killer sends shivers racing down the spine.

It is also impossible to praise too highly Imelda Staunton’s performance, as Mrs Lovett, the slatternly proprietor of a down-at-heel pie-shop whose business takes off when she hits on the ingenious idea of serving up Todd’s victims in pastry and gravy. Her customers become inadvertent cannibals as she dispenses, in one of Sondheim’s greatest lyrics, “shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd on top”.

What’s wonderful about Staunton is that she seems so sweet, funny and cosy, and her tender love for Sweeney is genuinely touching. Yet she is actually the real villain of the piece. You gurgle with pleasure at her every good-humoured, wickedly funny entrance, until her smiling face turns hard and her eyes go dead as she realises she must sacrifice the confused young boy she has befriended if she is to safeguard both her profits and her hope of marrying the psycho with whom she is besotted.

Some of the supporting performances could do with more oomph, and Lucy May Baker seems particularly bland and vocally strained as the persecuted heroine. The band, however, is superb, while Anthony Ward’s design creates a vivid sense of urban deprivation and decay.

But this Sweeney Todd will chiefly be remembered for its stomach-churningly gory razor killings, with blood squirting over the shop, and the thrillingly perverse chemistry between Ball’s terrifying demon barber and Staunton’s deliciously chirpy pie-maker.

Verdict: ****
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Ball presents us with a skilled barber nursing a private grievance, who only gradually turns into a demonic serial killer. Instead of playing the end from the beginning, Ball charts every stage of Sweeney's descent. And I mean it as the highest compliment when I say that he reminded me periodically of that other solitary outsider, Britten's Peter Grimes.

Imelda Staunton, with equal command, plays Mrs Lovett as a pinafored loner whose residual moral sense is quickly overcome by her love of profit and lust for Sweeney.

I shall never forget the way that her cries of horror, at detecting the first of his victims in a trunk, gradually turn into semi-orgasmic moans of pleasure. Staunton not only gives the evening its comic counterpoint, but confirms her great gift for discovering the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.

Verdict: *****
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I left the Adelphi impressed but sickened. Sweeney Todd is a dark night.
Imelda Staunton deploys all her comic talent as Mrs Lovett to try to alleviate the tale’s grisliness. It does not matter that her voice pinks and rattles like an Italian moped engine.

Every time her sparrow frame steps on stage, the pace quickens. This is no bad thing, for musical director Nicholas Skilbeck does not rush Sondheim’s schematic score.

Verdict: ****

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There are no reservations, however, about Imelda Staunton, whom, theatre-goers have long known, is a Living National Treasure, who ought to be preserved by law. In “The Worst Pies in London”, Mrs Lovett’s introduction to both Sweeney and the audience, Staunton is willing to crack notes, to sing coarsely, in order to convey her character. Her “By the Sea”, the lovelorn pie-maker’s dream ditty of a little cottage where her swain can do the odd guest in, is heart-breaking as well as hootingly comic. In fact, Staunton, quiet, efficient, and deadly, makes this production hers, all the while bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mrs Bones the Butcher’s Wife in Happy Families.
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This isn’t a flawless revival. Updating the setting from the Victorian era to what seems to be the Thirties is a misguided attempt at relevance. The action isn’t always as suspenseful as it needs to be. There’s too much emphasis on peripheral characters. Yet Sondheim’s varied, complex score is intelligently served; musical director Nicholas Skillbeck has achieved a nicely balanced sound.

Anthony Ward’s tall, brooding set transforms impressively from a shadowy cylinder framed by dark metal gates into an abattoir. And there’s some assured support, chiefly from Robert Burt as rival barber Pirelli and James McConville as Pirelli’s assistant.

This is an atmospheric Sweeney Todd, an unsettling musical thriller made razor-sharp by its two superb leads. When Ball and Staunton aren’t on stage we are impatient for their return.

Verdict: ****
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