‘Operation Mincemeat’ review
This review is from May 2019. 'Operation Mincemeat' just keeps coming back, with its biggest run to date scheduled for Riverside Studios in 2022. Fringe theatre favourites Kill the Beast have joined forces with ‘glam-punk composer’ Felix Hagan to form a new musical theatre company (SpitLip) and to stage a two-and-a-half-hour musical. Which isn’t very fringey but is very good fun. While previous shows have largely pastiched horror films, the subject of spoofery this time is WWII movies, and all manner of musical genres. Initially, you wonder if the cast of five can sustain their scrappy sketch comedy approach over a feature-length piece. But ‘Operation Mincemeat’ – while being about bungling officers with a madcap plan to thwart Hitler – is itself slicker than it wants to appear, and clearly well-drilled. The show also has a very sturdy backbone: Operation Mincemeat really happened. The British Army really did handcuff a briefcase of misleading ‘top secret’ papers to a corpse and send him off to be washed up on the coast of Spain. The documents were convincing enough for Hitler to send enormous numbers of soldiers to Sardinia and Greece, allowing the Allies to swoop in and take Sicily. Told with great brio, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is less a ripping yarn than one entirely torn to shreds. It takes mocking aim at the self-aggrandising, entitled and often cavalier attitude of naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu (played with appropriately bumptious swagger by Natasha Hodgson) as