One of the best reviewed shows in West End history OPERATION MINCEMEAT is coming to the Theatre Royal Bath as part of landmark world tour. Following the seventeenth West End and fifth Broadway extensions, the Tony Award and double Olivier Award-winning musical Operation Mincemeat, is visiting the Theatre Royal for two weeks from Monday 2 to Saturday 14 March.
In Operation Mincemeat, it’s 1943, and the Allied Forces are on the ropes. Luckily, they’ve got a trick up their sleeve. Well, not up their sleeve, per se, but rather inside the pocket of a stolen corpse. Equal parts farce, thriller, and Ian Fleming-style spy caper (with an assist from Mr. Fleming himself), Operation Mincemeat tells the wildly improbable and hilarious true story of the covert operation that turned the tide of WWII.
Five actors play more than 80 roles in the musical, about an MI5 plan to fool the Nazis about where an Allied invasion of Italy was to occur. The story, in fact, has all the earmarks of a plot hatched by Fleming himself, who was an MI5 operative at the time.
That plot involves planting misleading invasion plans on the body of an Allied pilot who supposedly has crashed into the sea off the coast of Nazi-infested Spain. Which means the MI5 spymasters must procure a body, find a way to plop it in Spanish waters with the fake plans, wait for the Nazis to discover the body — and hope they fall for the ruse.
SpitLip, the comedy collective who created Operation Mincemeat are David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson, Zoe Roberts and Felix Hagan . They talked with Peter Marks (Washington Post) about the award winning musical:
“We just had been devouring every kind of source we could for telling the story of ‘Operation Mincemeat,’” Felix Hagan recalled, and we’d come to this realisation that it chimed every macabre, sick, twisted bell in all our horrible heads.”
Hagan is one of the members of SpitLip, the madcap comedy collective that in 2017 came up with a wild premise: turning the tale of an improbably brash British wartime escapade, into an improbably brash British musical. And that what would seal the deal early on was that one of the real-life characters in the tale of this mind-boggling gambit — a major World War II turning point for the Allies — was none other than the author-creator of Agent 007.
“By miles, the funniest thing that we could think of at the start was that Ian Fleming was involved,” Hagan noted.
And off Hagan went with the other SpitLip members — Natasha Hodgson, Zoë Roberts and David Cumming on a creative binge that would eventually lead to London’s West End, and then to Broadway. To Roberts, who along with her SpitLip partners collaborated on the show’s book and score, the surprise and pleasure of the project has been its multi-generational appeal. “There’s something really joyful in the success of ‘Mincemeat,’” she observed, “the breadth of the age ranges, the backgrounds, the genders who enjoy it, and that, you know, that’s great.”
Of course, the musical is a witty riff on this beguilingly clever bit of spycraft. But the emotions it rouses, undergirding the ordeal of World War II, go deeper for British audiences. “For everyone that went to school here, that’s something that they would have covered,” said Christian Andrews, who plays the prim, kindly secretary Hester (and other characters) in the U.K. tour. “My great auntie loved telling us about the war — I think she must have been like 16 or something when World War Two started. And yeah, I adored sitting down and listening to her.”
“We love this story,” Hodgson said. “What felt funny about it, and what felt true about it, and what felt difficult and naughty.” The musical indeed ricochets from one emotional tone to another, from moments detailing little human absurdities during wartime, to evocations of the monumental human toll. Or as Hodgson put it, speaking as much about life as about “Operation Mincemeat”: “Things can go from being funny to tragic in a room, every day of your life.”
Forthcoming reviews:
Midsomer Murders: The Killings at Badger’s Drift at Everyman Theatre Cheltenham, 3 – 7 March https://stagetalkmagazine.com/p/38987
A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Bristol Old Vic, 4 – 21 March, https://stagetalkmagazine.com/p/38994
A Grain Of Sand at the Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic, 3 – 7 March, https://stagetalkmagazine.com/p/38991
Box Tales Soup’s 1984 at North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, 5 – 6 March https://stagetalkmagazine.com/p/38998
