In three weeks, Dundee Rep opens its latest production, Sondheim’s musical version of Sweeney Todd.
Every time the tale of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street is told, the delightful battle over whether his Sweeniness is fact or fiction is waged.
There’s a special Dundee slant on the argument — and it’s not just the love of pies.
While some consider that Sweeney Todd is one of the earliest urban myths, others argue that the old shaver was a real person who lived in Fleet Street at No.186, between St Dunstan’s Church and the London office of Courier publishers D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.
Our colleagues at the Fleet Street office — incidentally the last newspaper group to have a base in the street — have found themselves a destination on the tourist trail.
One day an American couple pitched up at DCT’s No.185 premises with a delightfully baffling request: “We are looking for the place where the almost certainly fictional Sweeney Todd is supposed to have lived.”
The 19th-century “penny dreadful” writer Thomas Prest is credited with creating the Sweeney tale, which is subtitled “the String of Pearls.”
Others say the character was based on a French barber from an earlier period, who liked nothing better than to cut customers across the throat.
He did not stretch to pies, however, perhaps aware of having the country’s culinary reputation to uphold.
The popular myth was supported when a large pit of bones was found under the cellars of 186 in the 1880s.
However, it did not really flesh out as it may have been from the old St Dunstan’s Church.
The legend runs that Mr Todd plied his trade at Hen and Chicken Court, a little courtyard behind 185.
It’s an area still used for recycling, but thankfully just of newspapers.
Stepney-born, Todd learned to barber at Newgate jail when serving a sentence, runs the story, before setting up in Fleet Street.
He installed the trick chair with its express route to the cellar and Mrs Lovett provided the pie shop in nearby Bell Yard.
Todd managed a tally of 160 before returning to Newgate to be hanged, and the rest of his customers lived happily ever after.
Sweeney Todd is at Dundee Rep from May 19 to June 12.
For more information visit www.dundeereptheatre.co.uk