The BBC site had this single image of Johnny Depp and his astonishing cheekbones portraying Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street who had an interesting sideline in meat pies with an unusual filling. The picture is from the Deppster’s latest collaboration with Tim Burton, Sweeney Todd, which I believe may be based on Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical version (oh, oh, oh, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp working on a film about a serial killing cannibalistic barber, whey am I so excited?!?!?). This should be great fun – Sweeney Todd is one of those fictional characters who has recurred in books, cinema, plays and television time and time again over the last century and a half (if not longer); in fact he has recurred so often that, as with other 19th century creations such as Spring Heeled Jack some people begin to believe he was a real character, or at least based on a real character (some authors have claimed this as truth but since they haven’t offered up reliable documentation to prove his life, trial and execution these, like Sweeney’s meat pies, should be taken with a pinch of salt).
It always fascinates me when certain character recur time and again; times and styles and tastes change and yet certain stories and characters remain with us because the essentials of human nature don’t really change, hence why today we find a figure like Sweeney still as fascinating and horrifying, why we are still reading tales of vampires and the Wandering Jew and other strange immortals, why old gods and folkloric archetypes still walk through our fiction (not least in the works of Neil Gaiman, who clearly understands the power of such figures in our shared imagination and dreams) in both their own forms and in new guises (superheroes being an obvious example of the latter, new characters but drawing on old mythic archetypes we all know on some deeper level) and why some like tales Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde still haunt us (with the BBC just completing a new adaptation by Doctor Who scribe Steven Moffat at the weekend, updating the Jekyll and Hyde mythos to the modern day). And it is even more fascinating to see such characters and tales repeated so often that they all but become real, with many convinced these characters actually existed while conversely actual historical figures like Jack the Ripper become confused and mixed with these characters until some think of them more as fictional and mythic. Our shared stories and characters and real people, our fictions and our realities – the lines between them aren’t as clear cut as we might think. Especially when it gets dark and we hear the sound of a razor being sharpened on a strop…
Mon, Jul 30, 2007
Film, TV and radio