Sweeney Todd, Adelphi Theatre, review 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.