Crackpot war story makes for incurably daft musical
Operation Mincemeat Fortune Theatre, WC2B ★★★★✩
ON paper, SpitLip Theatre’s delicious knockabout musical about a plot to fox Hitler shouldn’t work. Neither should the operation it was based on. But MI5’s crackpot misdirection scheme, in which fake invasion papers were planted on a washed-up corpse, minimised casualties on the allied spearhead into Europe in 1943.
Now an exuberant, energetic, incurably daft show about it is in the West End, after a five-year journey through fringe and regional theatres. Last night, three of its four co-creators were in the cast of five: the other two had been in it from the start, or nearly.
Mincemeat the musical has wit, charm, a subversive attitude to gender, a surprising amount of pathos, and a Eurobeat number for a Nazi boyband (yes, really). It’s also packed with deliberate anachronisms, outrageous overacting and sheepishly knowing in-jokes. It’s an embodiment of the eccentric British exceptionalism it both celebrates and mocks.
The arch jokiness is set in the opening number, Born to Lead, in which swaggering intelligence officers address the war as an extension of their schooldays. One is the pre-Bond Ian Fleming (Zoë Roberts), another is Ewen Montague, played by Natasha Hodgson in a bluff, gruff, freewheeling parody of cocksure
masculinity. Their plans to “just kill Hitler” are shot down by CO Johnny Bevan (Roberts again: frantic doubling of roles is a signature). So Montague commandeers the mad Mincemeat strategy of gawky-but-brilliant Charles Cholmondeley. In this role David Cumming ramps the show’s overblown acting style up to a level of hysteria that’s undeniably funny but sometimes grating.
He, Hodgson and Roberts wrote the book, music and lyrics with Felix Hagan, however, and their achievement can’t be understated. The script is nimble; the songs go through Noël Coward numbers to stirring sea shanties; the rhymes are inspired. The creators highlight the unsung contribution of backroom heroines Jean Leslie and Hester Leggett to the Mincemeat plot. In a production where hardly anyone is cast according to their gender pronouns, Jak Malone is very moving as Hester.
A microphone malfunction last night just added to the gung-ho fun. Glyndwr Michael, the homeless man whose dead body was co-opted to carry the Mincemeat plans, is honoured at the end. Quite right too. This show could be just what the West End needs.
To Aug 19: operationmincemeat.com