Before the Barber: Unpicking the Origin Story of Mrs Lovett

Ask anyone to picture Mrs Lovett, and they will likely conjure the iconic, slightly unhinged accomplice to Victorian theatre’s most famous barber. She is a mainstay of macabre fiction, yet behind the infamous meat pies lies a striking narrative silence.

In both Stephen Sondheim’s musical and the original 19th-century Penny Dreadfuls, Eleanor Lovett arrives on stage as an enigma - compelling, razor-sharp, but entirely without a backstory.

Now, a dark new drama from BoonDog Theatre coming to the Pavilion Arts Centre sets out to discover precisely how the sausage got made.

"Murderers aren’t born, they are made," explains writer and performer Lucy Roslyn. "And here, perhaps, is the recipe."

For those expecting a melody-driven evening, the company is keen to set the record straight immediately: this is emphatically not a musical. Instead, audiences can expect a twisting psychological thriller packed with gallows humour, gothic atmosphere, and a shrewdly political survivor telling her story in her own words.

"We wanted to lean away from the slightly mad version we have come to know and love," Lucy shared. "No one is the villain in their own story, and so Lovett paints a picture of an intelligent, reasonable woman - which makes her all the more frightening."

To build Eleanor Lovett from the ground up, Lucy immersed herself in the gritty, unforgiving realities of Victorian London. She explored the history of the Workhouses, the Foundling Hospital, and Southwark’s Crossbones Graveyard - a once-unconsecrated plot for society’s outcasts. To ground practical skills in raw realism, she even spent time with a local butcher learning how to break down a carcass and understand the value of every cut.

What emerged from this meticulous research was a story that mirrors many of our modern anxieties. "The more research we did, the more the parallels to today became clear. Some things in society never change: the powerful elite pull up the ladder and the poor suffer in the shadows. Into this inflexible cycle steps Eleanor Lovett."

Rather than presenting a monster, the show frames its protagonist as a complex, disarming human being - cruel and kind, reasonable and impulsive. By stripping away the urban legend, it asks how far any person might be pushed when pushed to the absolute edge.

"The best theatre asks twenty questions and answers only seventeen," Lucy notes. "It is up to our audience to decide for themselves if she is the hero or the villain. She is a product of her society, as we all are, and we all have a breaking point."

Ultimately, Lovett promises an intimate, nuanced hour with one of theatre's most enduring figures - a character you fully expect to dislike, but will almost certainly fall for anyway.