Sweeney Todd Extract
It was the year of 1865, with the dark tragedy of our story taking place in Victorian London. Caught within the rat-roaming, smoke filled streets of this industrialised capital was a small garden, a garden of no more than 2 fountains and thirty walkways streaming unpolluted water. Every day, after the torrid hours of every worker`s coughs, happenings and travel, this garden would be visited by three people; a child of no more than few months, and a barber and his wife. This barber was but a humble man with a humble life - a life of close shaves with the sharpest edges in the country and of love. He had loved his family like none before him had ever loved theirs, his wonderful wife Lucy, and his daughter, a mirror reflection of her own beautiful mother, Johanna. Benjamin Barker, this very same barber loved his wife to death and beyond, and his daughter no less.
However, the great tragedy begins here. Benjamin Barker had no words to describe his wife, but beautiful: so much so, our understanding of the story commences here.
There was a barber with a knife, and she was beautiful, the rest of the men weren’t fools however. Lucy was coveted by none other than the highest authority in the land, a judge of selfishness and scrutiny, Turpin. Turpin had courted Lucy for many a year, on the basis of a face not ruined by the pollution of London and hair as glistening yellow as the sun itself. However when she had mothered the child of the local barber, his rage would translate itself into revenge and retaliation. With the flick of his fingers, and nothing more than the word of his very own mouth he had Barker arrested, beaten and exiled to the Australian colony.
Barker would go mad and return many years later under a different identity for revenge, however our story now continues in London. Lucy approached Turpin for aid, she could think of none better to ask than the very man who ironically enough was orchestrating her lover`s exile and indirectly her eventual insanity. He asked her for her hand. However, she was adamant in remaining true to her imprisoned husband. He in turn would grant her aid, but he would not be able to at that very moment. He instructed her to attend an evening of social amongst the city`s elites, and there he would help her.
Days later Lucy would take her final paces as Lucy. She attended the ball seeking nothing more than Turpin`s help, however she had walked in on a masquerade ball, and none had their faces exposed. She felt exhausted in the raw claustrophobia of the room, and her heart still ached for poor Benjamin. She sought water, and was given what looked to be water: it was not. Within a few short minutes she would be drugged to the point of a conscious paralysis, laying there defenceless to all, and who would it be to take advantage of her in front of every London elite, the very man meant to condemn such a thing, Turpin had her drugged purposely to fulfil a long standing desire of his. He raped her, he raped her in front of the entire Masquerade, with his mask on throughout only to mock the immobile Lucy.
Her shame and heartache overcame her, and with her mobility returning to her the next morning, she broke into the store of a chemist and acquired arsenic, rat poison. She drank as much as she could in an attempt at suicide: she failed. She loved on to see many more years, however not as Lucy, her traumatic life had caused her so much distress and it was part of life`s cruel trick to not have her life taken by the arsenic: she would go insane and forget herself, she would forget all she held dear, for it was too painful to do otherwise. She went insane, from the most beautiful woman in London to a beggar woman on the streets that everyone thought was dead or had been locked away in chains as an extension of Barker`s crimes. She was no more.
Taken and adapted from the 2007 film production of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” by Luke Abela.
