Bloody marvellous

Sweeney Todd cuts to the quick, while open-air Camelot resonates mainly to the sound of chain mail

The following apology was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday August 8, 2004

Contrary to the review below, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler did not 'provide a biography' for Sweeney Todd. CG Bond did, and it is on his play that the musical is based.

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Sweeney Todd Trafalgar Studies, London SW1

Camelot Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, London NW1

Vodou Nation Hackney Empire, London E8

This is the second time in 12 months that Sondheim's demon barber has appeared in London. The Royal Opera House gave him a big spread at Christmas. John Doyle's production, first seen at the Watermill, is small-scale, rough around the edges, rapid. It hits just the right nerve, playing along the, well, razor's edge of grisliness and gaiety.

It's no surprise that people keep wanting to stage Sweeney Todd. Fuelled by Sondheim's rasping, alluring music, it winds its way into urban anxiety. It's a penny dreadful; its names - Todd and Lovett, death and romance - promise a cartoon morality tale. But Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler (who wrote the book) have also provided a biography for Todd - whose wife and child were taken from him by a big bad judge - which gives him a reason for revenge. His butchery can look, in a not very bright light, like the vengeance of the underclass on its better-upholstered rulers: 'He'd seen how civilised men behave/ He never forgot and he never forgave.'

This 'musical thriller' can be a large-scale, sceptical swoop on the great wen, taking in everyone from beggar to beadle. It can also be a nightmare of claustrophobia: people are always tied down and locked up, in lunatic asylum, domestic prison or barber's chair. Doyle's production - not always clearly plotted or impeccably sung, but remorselessly gripping - is so stripped-down that it feels like the tour of a maniac's head.

The entire stage is held by the horror and thrill of killing. As a victim goes to the knife, the light goes scarlet, the murderer slips into a white coat streaked with crimson, and a river of blood is tipped from an enamel bucket. The cast of nine step out of their roles, though not out of character, and into instruments. Rebecca Jenkins is Joanna - Todd's daughter, who is lusted after by the revered and corrupt judge who keeps her prisoner. She maintains her wanness behind a cello, bowing away, all woebegone. Karen Mann is a storming Mrs Lovett - baker of the 'worst pies in town' - who, when she's not polishing her choppers on a red skirt, blows mightily on a trumpet - the brassy expression of her personality. Paul Hegarty is a melancholy Todd, whose menace is growing. What a terrific addition to the new Trafalgar Studios - an alternative West End, round the corner from the spot where the barber stropped his razor.

A week after her husband's assassination, Jackie Kennedy described how JFK would play the album of Camelot before retiring at night, grooving to the refrain, 'Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot'. Apparently when American theatre audiences heard the song they were reduced to tears.

Lerner and Loewe must have breathed a sigh of relief. Four years earlier they'd created the soaring success that was My Fair Lady. But too much of Camelot sounds like a feeble rehash of the previous show's songs. And although it takes in some unexpected territory - this is the kingdom 'where the table is round and the relationships triangular' - the show's structure is shaky and its treatment of Arthur and his knights conventional. Topical resonance was needed.

The resonance could still be heard by British audiences. Camelot, after all, begins with a leader determined to set up a purer British regime and ends with that leader engulfed in a threatening war. But these suggestions are absent from Ian Talbot's prettily sung (especially by Lauren Ward's Guenevere) production, which is overwhelmed by the show's medieval heritage aspect: saucy girls, and men with Braveheart hair and headbands charging around in chain-mail tunics.

Russ Abbott raises some laughs with a dodgy helmet and goofy way with a bad ('just off to knight school') gag. And the beauty of the Open Air Theatre exerts its power: shadows of night surround cast and audience as Camelot loses its innocence. But the one-time hit song 'How to Handle a Woman' could never be other than gruesome: it makes women sound like anteaters.

The restored Hackney Empire is so glorious that it's a show in itself. It outshines Vodou Nation, a history of Haiti in dance, song and video which, despite inspired drumming and dashing imagery, is too over-amplified, blurrily filmed and under-choreographed to live up to the promise of its idea.

The Empire deserves major shows, huge ideas. The notion that the RSC might ever be seen there is greeted with derision: no one, it's said, would go there. But 'everyone' went to the Gainsborough Studios to see the Almeida, who went to Shoreditch before artistic London lurched eastwards. Who will colonise the Empire?

Three to see

Measure for Measure Olivier, London SE1
Simon McBurney's enthralling production.

Hamlet RSC, Stratford
Toby Stephens's snarling prince.

Marieluise Gate, London W11
Winner of the Gate's Translation Award, about Brecht's muse.