London Theater Journal: Body Counts When the cannibal pie-maker Mrs. Lovett sings "times is hard" in the popular new revival of "Sweeney Todd" at the Adelphi Theater, the words reverberate more than usual. Played by a smashing Imelda Staunton as the ultimate avatar of British can-do resourcefulness, Mrs. Lovett inhabits a visual landscape guaranteed sure to set off alarm bells in London audiences. That's in addition to the usual tensions that come from knowing that many throats will be cut before the evening's end. As directed by Jonathan Kent and designed by Anthony Ward, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" has been transported from its original Victorian setting to the bleak, battered London of the 1930s. The abject huddled masses on stage summon images that are still a living and disturbing part of this country's collective memory. The front page of The Guardian on Monday led with the headline, "Breadline Britain: 7m adults just one bill away from disaster." Yes, Sweeney Todd - murderous and mad as hell - has risen from his grave to haunt the Great Depression. Played by Michael Ball, a dimply sweetheart of the West End transformed beyond recognition here, this Sweeney isn't just a bogeyman; he's a folk hero wreaking vengeance on the fat cats and self-serving politicians who have consigned his lot to hell. I didn't fall in love with this revival, which has serious problems of tone and, uh, execution. But like most London critics, my fellow theatergoers gobbled it up with gusto. When the blood started spurting - and spurt it does, in big globular arcs - the audience roared like the Romans watching the slave-devouring lions in "Quo Vadis." Then there was the bony young man sitting beside me who delivered a steady "heh-heh-heh," like a Satanic Geiger counter, in the manner of a grown-up Beavis. Bloody-minded times call for bloody circuses, I suppose. I have never known a London season in which the on-stage body count has been quite so high. There has of course been the usual carnage-heavy Shakespeare (including a riff on "Hamlet" in which every single character dies) and Jacobean tragedies (a superb "Duchess of Malfi" at the Old Vic, in which the strangling of Eve Best in the title role takes a harrowingly long time). Add to this Josie Rourke's lively production of Friedrich Durrenmatt's seldom-seen "Physicists," which begins with the sight of a lovely young corpse center stage and proceeds to contemplate the nuclear annihilation of the world. Then there's the reverberant final image of the National Theater's "Antigone," directed by Polly Findlay: a bloody handprint smeared across a wall. The blood comes from the corpses of the son and wife of the king, Creon (Christopher Eccleston), and it reads as an emblem of the slaughter that has occurred and will doubtless continue in Sophocles" war-shredded world. Designed by the busy and very talented Soutra Gilmour, this is a classic yesterday-is-today production, set in what looks like a contemporary war room. As the critic Michael Billington pointed out in The Guardian, the opening image - in which a tense, seated group of government and military personnel cheer images of a martial victory being simulcast on a screen - brings to mind President Obama and company learning of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Curiously, this ripped-from-the-headlines presentation had, for me at least, the effect of further distancing the events on stage than a more traditional or abstract version. Even speaking Don Taylor's uncluttered, vernacular translation, the performers (who include Jodie Whittaker as a scrappy, of-the-people Antigone and a naturalistic chorus of aides-de-camp and office workers) seem frozen in formal debate. Yes, they all look like folks we've seen on the telly, if not next door. But dressing them up in contemporary power suits and battle gear feels like too easy a bid for relevance. I admired Mr. Ecceleston's restrained portrait of a man straitjacketed by his political role and his mindless adherence to its rules. Yet the one time I felt truly moved was when a horror-struck messenger (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) described, with pained hesitation and disbelief, two suicides he had witnessed. The blood-drenched corpses that were subsequently dragged onto the stage registered, by comparison, as mere clinical evidence. "The Rest Is Silence," a production of the dreamthinkspeak company (and part of the far-reaching World Shakespeare Festival in London), asks us to press our noses against the glass to observe the power players of "Hamlet" and perhaps to see our own images there. Staged by Tristan Sharps at the Riverside Studios, "Silence" places its audience members in a seemingly empty room, where they will stand for the next 90 minutes or so and watch the walls around them. Those walls turn out to be windows, and when they're illuminated, they reveal the royal boudoirs and state rooms of Elsinore, which are the last word, my dear, in Danish modern. We start off (after some video recapping of the murder of Hamlet's father) with Claudius in his bathroom, going over his first speech, which will later be delivered to a television camera. Claudius is buck naked, presumably so we can understand why Gertrude would marry him. Pared to a mere nine characters, and to less than a third of the normal length of "Hamlet," this interpretation deliberately repeats itself, with characters reciting their lines in anticipation of statements they will later deliver to others. As for Hamlet's most-quoted soliloquy, the one that begins "to be or not be," everybody recites it together, after discovering copies he has scribbled in various notebooks. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spend much of their time taking apart and reconstructing Hamlet's speeches, like giddy, fatuous semantic students. If you already know "Hamlet" (and I had just seen a galloping story-theater version at Shakespeare's Globe), "Silence" is kind of fun. It addresses the verbal self-consciousness that is so much a part of this play, an awareness of both the inadequacy and potency of "words, words, words." You get caught up in the parlor game aspect of it, and then suddenly you're reminded that it's about mortal flesh as well as immortal language. When the bodies pile up in the final scene, they're within touching distance. You are suddenly grateful for those panes of glass; you are also inspired to think, perhaps self-reproachfully, of the distance and closeness of what we watch on television and computer screens. Though there were no glass walls to be seen, I felt safely removed from the carnival of gore that is "Sweeney Todd." Mr. Kent is justly celebrated for the visual poetry of his productions. And here he and Mr. Ward have conjured up a squalid, shabby Depression-era London that brings to mind Patrick Hamilton's dark and bitter novels of that period. Yet because Mr. Sondheim's score plays so artfully with conventions of Victorian music, there's a disconnect between the look and the sound. This is underscored by the imprecision of much of the singing, in which notes and words are often lost. Mr. Ball has two gears as Sweeney: old-school cinematic psychopath and light lyrical crooner. He never bridges the dichotomy in a way that makes convincing sense of Sweeney's obsessions. And the epic scale of the show, with its moving "Les Miserables"-style scenery, often undercuts what should be bravura climaxes. But Ms. Staunton, who received an Oscar nomination for playing the backroom abortionist in "Vera Drake," is a scarily credible Mrs. Lovett - earthy, pragmatic and hungry, even if her singing sometimes veers into squawking. Like Vera Drake, her Mrs. Lovett is a woman who knows from privation and will do whatever's required to keep poverty at bay. She is, in her way, the very model of chin-up, eyes-ahead British resourcefulness. She brings to mind another cozy British archetype, too, that of the devoted tabloid reader who finds cathartic pleasure in accounts of grisly murders. When Mrs. Lovett comes across the corpse of Sweeney's first victim, she responds with a sustained noise that's somewhere between a scream and a satisfied coo. At that moment, she seemed to be summing up just how the audience felt.