REVIEW: Operation Mincemeat, Theatre Royal
Stiff upper lips, tongues in cheeks
Coming up with unlikely subjects for stage musicals should be a popular parlour game. Perhaps it already is.
It would be a mug’s game, of course. There’s no magic formula. Lloyd Webber’s had a flop or two and even a seasoned (if fictional) Broadway hand like Max Bialystock got it spectacularly wrong.
Springtime for Hitler was intended as a surefire box office stinker, guaranteeing riches through an accountant’s twisted scheme, but audiences loved it, as you’ll see in The Producers by the great Mel Brooks – who, incidentally, turns 100 on June 28.
I confess Operation Mincemeat might have been my Springtime for Hitler.
I mean, who would stage a musical about an act of wartime deception involving a corpse with its pockets stuffed with misleading information? And who would want to see it?
Answer to the first question: the SpitLip group who evidently spurned proper jobs to become “makers of big dumb musicals”. Answer to the second: absolutely loads of people.
Many packed the theatre on Monday for the start of a run that’s on the way to becoming a sell-out, interest stoked, no doubt, by the awards and acclaim garnered by what started life as a studio affair in 2019. And, of course, the recent film starring Colin Firth.
It is madly energetic, the cast of five leaping around the stage to play myriad wartime characters, but beginning as MI5 staff charged with devising a diversionary tactic ahead of the planned invasion of Sicily in 1943.
They were “born to lead”, as the first song – typically loud and with rat-tat-tat tongue-twister lyrics – tells us, satirising the wartime equating of ‘intelligence’ with attendance at a posh school and access to ponies.
Charles Cholmondeley – moustache, fond of newts, none too pushy – has a scheme which is whipped off him smartly by Ewen Montagu, pretty fond of himself and pushy almost to a fault.
It’s the corpse idea and it finds favour with Johnny Bevan who’s running the show, aided by Hester Leggatt, senior secretary, and Jean Leslie, a wannabe from the typing pool.
And so the (true) story proceeds at breakneck pace with occasional laughs at the expense of Ian Fleming, the budding Bond novelist who had a hand in the real Mincemeat deception when at MI5 during the war.
With stiff upper lips and tongues in cheeks, the cast relate how ‘Major Bill Martin’ was floated from a submarine off the coast of Spain to fall into the hands of the enemy, his pockets duly sifted.
Seeming to suggest an imminent invasion of Sardinia, the Germans reinforced the island and left Sicily lightly defended.
The cast is what you might call gender-fluid with the lofty Christian Andrews cast as Hester – and delivering one of the show’s stand-out moments when reciting, by way of song, a letter from ‘Bill’s’ ‘fiancée’ to be secreted on his body for authenticity – and the irrepressible Holly Sumpton playing Montagu.
Jamie-Rose Monk plays the (occasionally) Churchillian Johnny Bevan, Séan Carey is the hapless Cholmondeley and Charlotte Hanna-Williams plays Jean Leslie who’s brighter than all of them but so what because she’s from the typing pool.
To say it has its moments wouldn’t be quite right because it’s one long moment, and rather too long for my taste. The songs, bar Hester’s, didn’t last in my head long after leaving the theatre.
And because it’s gag after gag, there’s perhaps not quite enough room to reflect on what was at stake in all of this.
Hester’s song, in fact a memory of her ‘Tom’ lost in the last war, silenced the audience and there was a nice tribute, though right at the end, to the man who became Major Bill, the homeless Welshman identified as Glyndwr Michael, a sad chap alone in the world.
There are laughs to be had from wartime but war is not funny. Ask Max Bialystock. The audience, though, at the end, was on its feet, ecstatic.
Operation Mincemeat runs until Saturday, June 27. Tickets (if any left) from the Theatre Royal website.