Dark comedy about Mrs Lovett heads to The Quay Theatre
BoonDog Theatre will be performing their fascinating, darkly comic origin story of Sweeney Todd’s Mrs Lovett next week at The Quay Theatre in Sudbury.
Currently on tour, the multi-award winning collaborative company has been performing the one-woman show across the country since last year, and it has received glowing reviews for its dark, compelling look at Mrs Lovett and her life before the infamous partnership with ‘The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’.
Now ‘Lovett’ is coming to Suffolk.
BoonDog’s Writer and Creative Director, Lucy Roslyn, performs the starring role, and she is directed by her co-founder Jamie Firth.
Here they talk about the play, the character and the thought-process behind the performance:
Writer and star Lucy Roslyn, and Director Jamie Firth, talk about their touring play ‘Lovett’ and the inspiration behind their creation.
The pair started the Midlands-based company in 2012 to create new writing for the stage; telling stories that start conversations that last long beyond the audience leaving the theatre.
Their latest play will do just that, as they explore the well-known Gothic character and what eventually lead her to turn pie-maker - the brutal choices and disappointments of a life in poverty.
The newly widowed Mrs Lovett needs to find a way to survive and using skills learned from a whaler father, a courtesan mother and a butcher husband, she ‘recalibrates’ her life - and her relationship with God. The scales of social justice may be tipped against her, but Eleanor has counterweights of her own: creativity, a can-do spirit and a dream of joys to come.
But wait.
When the difference is life or death, morality becomes a moveable feast - and Eleanor is getting hungry...
BoonDog are known for creating exciting new stories for the stage. Their plays are typically darkly comic, intimate, character-driven and ‘covertly political’ with deep historical or psychological research. And this has an age restriction of 14+. With all that in mind, ‘Lovett’ is bound to be a fascinating and potentially gruesome tale - one to really get your teeth into.
Lovett is at The Quay Theatre in Sudbury on 2 September 2026.
FOR SHOW DETAILS AND BOOKING LINK, CLICK HERE