There is a moment around Operation Mincemeat’s halfway mark when a hitherto rather sour matron sings a ballad about letter writing so unexpectedly moving that you forget for a second that you have been watching a musical whose protagonist is a stolen corpse, writes Madeleine Kelly.
The musical, brain-child of musical theatre company SpitLip, tells the story of the very real and really ridiculous Operation Mincemeat. The operation was a successful WWII plot concocted by the British Army to fool Hitler into moving a large number of troops from Sicily to Sardinia using a corpse sent off to be washed up on the coast of Spain with a number of ‘top secret’ papers in a briefcase attached to his wrist.
SpitLip make light work of this ludicrous tale refusing to see it so much as a tale of British derring-do than as an absurd feat of luck pulled off by an even more absurd group of characters we might recognise as the British elite. This satirical take on the operation, especially its skewering of the idea of a British ruling class ‘born to lead’, is interesting and timely but it has one major flaw: the success of the operation. Even if the whole thing is pulled off frequently in spite of the interventions of the dashing head of the operation, Ewan Montagu (played by the brilliant and energetic Natasha Hodgson), his cavalier and privileged attitude never really meets its downfall, a fact briefly acknowledged by the musical and then glossed over by the finale. The worst thing that happens to him is that he is revealed to be a fool, a comeuppance that at the very least he might have considered a fate worse than death were he self-aware enough to know it had happened.
But despite the limits of its satirical aim, Operation Mincemeat is a laugh-a-minute show produced on a shoestring budget that somehow never stops it from feeling like a big, camp production. This is in large part thanks to Felix Hagan’s wonderful music and the extraordinary performances from the five actors who switch seamlessly and utterly believably between characters. Although all five give brilliant performances, it is Jak Malone who stands out. In one moment having you roll on the floor with laughter in his role as an outlandish coroner and in the next having you on the floor for quite different reasons in his heart rending role as Hester, the stoic and yet grief-stricken secretary.
This clever balance between laughter and tears, lightness and weight is the show’s real magic. If you like joy – and sequins – this one’s for you.
Southwark Playhouse, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD until 18th September. Admission: £27.50, £22, £18. Box Office: 0207 407 0234 – www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
