Off-West End theatre

SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios, and has now made impact in Theatreland – wiping out a West End dinosaur to boot, as it displaces ‘The Woman in Black’ after over 30 years at the Fortune Theatre. And it’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company, which consists of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Robert. All bar Hagan perform in the show, with Claire Marie Hall and Jak Malone rounding out the cast. This is very much their triumph. And though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is at heart the same show it always was. There are no added backing dancers or bombastic reorchestrations. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s a very larky account of the World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, a ploy from British intelligence to feed the German army disinformation via a briefcase of false war plans strapped to a corpse that they hoped to pass off as a downed British pilot (yes, there was a recent film with exactly the same name, about exactly the same thing, and yes they do make a joke about this). The story centres on Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), the socially inept MI5 operative who dreams up the plan, and Ewen Montague (Hodgson), the

A Unicorn Theatre long-runner, Sarah Argent and Kevin Lewis's ‘Baby Show’ is one of London's rare regular theatre experiences for the very young. A light and sound-based sensory experience for ages six-to-18-months, it tends to be very popular and advance booking is advised. Multiple performances take place throughout the day.

This review is from May 2019. ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ returns for 2024 with casting TBC. Writer-director Jethro Compton strikes fringe gold with this beguiling musical adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story about a man who ages backwards, probably better known for the lumbering 2008 Brad Pitt film. Like the movie, Compton’s take on ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ is a very free adaptation, being a lovably ramshackle and surging folk opera in which the story is transposed from nineteenth-century Baltimore to twentieth-century Cornwall. Benjamin is the son of an ordinary local couple who are horrified to discover that their newborn ‘child’ is – inexplicably – an 80-year-old man, with no memories but fluent English and a smoking habit. Benjamin’s mother is so upset she kills herself; his father keeps Benjamin locked away in the house, assuming he will live out his final years there. In fact, it becomes slowly apparent that Benjamin is getting younger. After some years have passed, James Marlowe’s gentle, troubled Benjamin is allowed to go to the pub on the sly, where he meets a vivacious barmaid named Elowen, who will go on to be the (extremely complicated) love of his life. The production is defined by the wide-eyed brio of the five-strong, all-instrumentalist cast, and director Compton and musical director Darren Clark’s propulsive, harmony-drenched folk songs. And unlike the portentous film, the script is infused with the humour of the shant