There hasn’t been a more hyped, and better received, musical since Hamilton than the British show Operation Mincemeat. However, the two shows could not be more different. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and original star of Hamilton, was already an Emmy award-winning writer and composer when the show first exploded onto the New York stage in 2015, whereas the creative minds behind Operation Mincemeat, in the forms of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, were part of a comedy troupe named SplitLip which formed in 2017 with the aim of making “big, dumb musicals”.
It says a lot for both luck and talent that they hit it out of the park with this show, which has not only wowed London audiences since it premiered at the New Diorama Theatre in 2019, but has now taken over Broadway too. The original troupe are currently packing them in on the Great White Way — joined by the excellent, Olivier award-winning Jak Malone — and so a new cast of seasoned theatrical professionals have taken over in the West End, where the show’s run at the Fortune Theatre — which has been going since 2023 — has just been extended into well into 2026. There is a UK tour for next year, and a global jaunt thereafter. And all this for a good-natured but slapdash and rambunctious musical that was only ever intended as a bit of fun in the first place. Can unfairly raised expectations count against it?
The storyline, as any WWII student must know, is based on the real-life incident in 1943, in which the British managed to fool the Germans into disguising the imminent invasion of Sicily by dressing up the body of a vagrant as a distinguished military officer and placing documents on the corpse that suggested that the Allies would instead invade Sardinia. It’s a richly dramatic story, made into two separate films — 1956’s The Man Who Never Was and the more recent Colin Firth and Matthew MacFadyen vehicle Operation Mincemeat — but the surprising and refreshing thing about the show is that it plays the historical events for hearty laughs as a kind of bawdy knockabout.
The five-strong cast switch genders and roles with aplomb, but the most memorable characters are Ewen Montagu, the dashing but conceited architect of the plan, Charles Cholmondeley, his more diffident colleague (or, as one of the best jokes has it, “lolloping sidekick”) and the MI5 employee Hester Leggatt, who delivers the first act’s most affecting number, “Dear Bill”, in which Hester channels her own memories of a lost fiancé to create a love letter that will be found on the corpse. Yet most of the time, this races along breathlessly, throwing in jokes old, new, good and bad and with a selection of brassily identikit songs that are enjoyable enough without sticking in the mind too long.
It is easy to see the appeal of Operation Mincemeat, but it is also hard to see why it has become quite so beloved by so many people. It has an endearingly slapdash feel to the costume changes, the knowingly OTT performances and the rough-and-ready music that feel somewhere between The Play That Goes Wrong school of very British tomfoolery and a more than usually accomplished Footlights play. The show has drafted in the estimable Robert Hastie to direct the West End version, and he gives it a surface glitz and glamour (most notably in the finale song, appropriately entitled “A Glitzy Finale”) that makes it all zip along. And some of the more leftfield moments — such as a Nazi knees-up, “Das Übermensch”, that begins the second half — elicit gales of laughter, helped by Alex Young’s sublime, pantomime boy-esque performance as Montagu, complete with peerless delivery of lines like “A loud boy is a good boy!”
There is a goofy level of joy here that is infectious, if at times a little “organised fun”
Yet while those around me — I suspect many seeing it for the third or fourth time — were guffawing and howling away, I must confess that my own enthusiasm for the hi-jinks began to wane as the show continued. After a patchy but largely entertaining first half, the second half more or less repeats the schtick, to diminishing returns. There is only so much jollity and japery that this critic can manage, and I was actively bored towards the end of the show, which is never a good sign. There is probably a very fine 60-minute production here, or an entertaining 90-minute one, but this has somehow been allowed to stretch to two and a half hours, which is a wearying level of indulgence for what is ultimately a well-conceived skit taken considerably further.
It would be churlish to criticise Operation Mincemeat too harshly. There is a goofy level of joy here that is infectious, if at times a little “organised fun”, and the talented cast manage to erase memories of the original creators with ease. No doubt it will be appearing at a well-respected regional theatre near you next year, and I would certainly recommend seeing the show, if only out of curiosity. If your expectations are for a fun, silly night with the odd moment of poignancy, then you won’t be disappointed. But something epochal? That, alas, is very much not the case.
