It Is a rare and heartening sight to see a queue for returns forming in a Fringe theatre on a cold Tuesday evening.

Yet such is the Union’s burgeoning reputation for innovative stagings of musicals — for which it was rightly awarded a Peter Brook Empty Space Award this year — that demand is high and seats are already scarce for this superb revival of Stephen Sondheim’s superior gore fest.

The sheer scale of the Union’s ambition here would put not only its peers but also better-funded rivals to shame.

The live accompaniment is niftily and tunefully provided by a grand piano and a church organ. There is a cast of 17, including a West End-style chorus of eight, and they are all better singers than Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, which is good news for Sondheim’s sophisticated, literate lyrics.

Director Sasha Regan fills the tiny playing area so cleverly that all of grey, sinister, stinking London is suggested.

Mrs Lovett, joyously played by Emma Francis, still hasn’t read a cookbook, revelling in her claim to produce “The Worst Pies in London”.
An enterprising businesswoman, she’s certainly got the hots for Christopher Howell’s bloody yet oddly bloodless Todd, who would better suggest a man on a revenge mission if he were a little more minatory.

Leon Kay and Katie Stokes are outstanding as the pure-voiced young lovers who develop a fatal habit for wrong times and wrong places.

Occasionally the lack of microphones means that we lose important words of plot-heavy songs, yet the opportunity to hear performers’ voices unadorned like this is rare in our heavily amplified times.

As Signor Pirelli himself might have put it, a miracle elixir of a night.