Page "Sweeney Todd" Paragraph 23

* Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ( 1973 ), a play by the British playwright Christopher Bond.

This version of the story was the first to give Todd a more sympathetic motive: he is a wrongfully imprisoned barber who returns to London after 15 years in an Australian penal colony under the new name Sweeney Todd, only to find that the judge responsible for his imprisonment has raped his young wife and driven her to suicide, and adopted his daughter.

He at first plans to kill the judge, but when his prey escapes, he swears revenge on the whole world and begins to slash the throats of his customers.

The character's new, tragic backstory was Bond's way of grafting dramatic themes from The Revenger's Tragedy onto Pitt's stage plot.