If you didn’t get quite your fill of blood and guts over Halloween, then Sweeney Todd should do the trick. From the funereally discordant organ opening, Lewis Tan’s macabre set provides the skeleton of a dark, multi-storey Fleet Street well-suited to Sweeney’s subterfuge, every sinister morsel of which is sharply audible thanks to Michael Craddock’s cutting diction and Andrew Ryrie’s crisp sound engineering.

Fleshing out the jutting bones of the scaffold - whose angles glint under the lights to reflect the depravity of the demon barber - is a juicy performance of Sondheim’s musical, directed by Anthony Woodman. From the dizzying heights of Anna Cavaliero’s bower-bound soprano as the ghostly songbird Johanna to the baritone depths of Laurence Williams’ base intentions to marry her (despite her being his ward) the singing grasps the drama of the lyrics. It is sustained and augmented by the chorus, a morbid choir of ghoulish and masklike faces, spot-lit by torchlight in moments of individual melody, and who contribute a consistent slickness to the pace of the action.

Craddock’s Todd is engaging, a performance of progressively increasing gravitas and mania, oscillating between his dual identities as frequently as he climbs up to his putrid parlour from Mrs Lovett’s cannibalistic fast-food joint downstairs. Above the street-level below, where he reveals his glazed, dazed introspective identity as Benjamin Barker, the unjustly transported convict of 15 years prior, Craddock exploits the meta-theatrical posturing of his barbershop stage and revels in the murderous melodrama he excites as the newfangled cutthroat Sweeney, rhapsodising revenge. Unlike Lorna Reader’s Mrs Lovett, however, who dirties her hands convincingly in her pie flour, Sweeney remains somewhat implausibly clean. Gizzard gore appears impressively on the white sheets he uses to shroud the bodies of his victims, but it would have been yet more satisfying to see the odd damned spot on the butcher himself, who does look just a little bit like a newsreader.

The suit-clad Sweeney and his resolutely RP accent do work, however, to suggest a more distinguished background to the character than is implied in the 2007 Tim Burton film. This ensured that, like Mrs Lovett in her hot pink denim shorts, baggy old jumper, and fortune-teller style bandana, the eponymous hero didn’t risk an intrusive evocation of the cinematic. If Reader and Craddock look a little incongruous as partners in crime, however, their symbiotic relationship onstage is enough to dispel their visual juxtaposition.

Lorna Reader is a tasty Mrs Lovett, her performance well-seasoned with expressive acting to accompany her often challenging songs, and she is thoroughly convincing as mastermind behind all the mischievous meat-mincing. She and Craddock successfully work the pseudo-tragic discrepancy between her desire for him and his desire for revenge, of which the rendition of ‘By The Sea’ is a memorable testament.

Less flavoursome was Mark Linford’s Anthony, who didn’t quite wrestle free of a ‘lost puppy’ look for most of his performance, which was by no means unsavoury, but a little bland. Conversely James Cormack’s Pirelli was an explosion of accented colour, initially spiced with vibrant Italian flamboyance and topped with an Irish lilt to ensure his performance was every bit as loud as his shirt. Judge Turpin and the Beadle provide a dour bureaucratic juxtaposition to this, although Hiroshi Amako’s Beadle lacks the obsequiousness which would help to crank up Williams’ disagreeability to a less apologetic level of malevolence. Their singing, however, is rich and atmospheric, as is Harriet Flower’s Beggar Woman, who furnishes the play with a haunting chill as iconically ominous as the elevated - and articulated - barber’s seat of dispatch.

Michael Hamway deftly avoids the awkwardness of being a young man playing a young boy in his performance of Toby; a characteristic sensitivity to detail in a production which on the whole admirably manages the challenge of multiple musical murders and necessity for complex theatrical engineering to ensure the appropriate suspension of disbelief.  So whilst there is a somewhat comic lack of facial hair in a play about a barber, the acting, set and atmospheric live musical accompaniment to a talented troupe of singers all conspire entertainingly well to bring about all the meaty mischief, madness and melodrama you’d expect from Sweeney Todd at Halloween.