What was Mrs. Lovett’s life like before she met Sweeney Todd?  I thought immediately of the moment she decided to start baking her pies using an unprecedented ingredient, thus turning the elite of London into unsuspecting cannibals:

Seems an awful waste…
Such a nice plump frame
…Think of it as thrift, as a gift
If you get my drift

But of course, what I was thinking about was Stephen Sondheim’s Mrs. Lovett.  He just borrowed her. The character belongs to the British, originating in the vividly named “penny dreadfuls” in the mid 1800s.

“Lovett” is not at all dreadful, but it is far darker, gruesome even, than I was ready for, and more…British; some references flew over me. I also sometimes had trouble distinguishing among the characters in this solo show. 

But as written and performed by Lucy Roslyn, Eleanor Mews (for that is her name at first) comes to deadly life, holding her own against characters of questionable character, and revealing what could be called an edgy streak at an early age. As a child, she is eager to watch her father, a whaler, cut up a whale. She is not eager to follow the career path of her mother, a courtesan. She plots her revenge against Mon Pere, an abusive cleric from her childhood.  Eleanor marries an older butcher named Armin Lovett, whose idea of a good time is playing chess, but at least he teaches her his trade before he dies. We first see her in the play expertly handling knives, a little bit of foreshadowing. She informs us authoritatively that once an animal has died “it becomes a body. Once you drain the body, it becomes a carcass, and by the time it leaves the block, it is meat.”

Is it any surprise that Eleanor has what one might call an instant animal attraction to a young barber half her age named Master Todd?

***Lovett is on stage through August 25 at Cellar at Pleasance Courtyard, part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.