ajhlovestheatre

OPERATION MINCEMEAT

Book, music and lyrics by David Cumming, Felix Roberts, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts

Directed by Robert Hastie

Fortune Theatre, London – booking until 19 August 2023

https://www.operationmincemeat.com

Operation Mincemeat has finally found its heart….and what a sentimental, thoroughly decent, and surprisingly transformative heart it is. I suspect the addition of a world class director (Sheffield Theatre AD Robert Hastie, who has already proved with Standing At The Skys Edge that he is peerless when it comes to calibrating breathtaking ingenuity with raw emotion) is a major component into turning this brilliant little show into an entirely satisfying, but still pleasingly oddball, West End triumph.

On it’s first outings at the New Diorama and Southwark Playhouse (I missed the Riverside Studios season as I felt I’d had enough by then) I found comedy troupe SpitLip’s sick (in both senses of the word) tranche of so-strange-it-could-only-be-true satirical insanity to be a ferociously clever, adrenalised mash-up of the Cambridge Footlights, Little Britain and The Rocky Horror Show. I also felt it needed to calm down, focus and breathe. It was fabulous, but a little relentless, as it told a frantic (with the emphasis on the “ick”) story centred on a real life WW2 incident whereby the British Secret Service wrong-footed the Nazis by casting an immaculately suited corpse adrift in the Mediterranean with a briefcase full of official-looking, but entirely bogus, government documents.

There was always much to admire in its energy, wit and masterly compounding of seemingly every musical theatre cliché in the book. The erudite, memorable, pastiche-heavy score references everything from Gilbert & Sullivan via Kander & Ebb and Billy Elliot to Hamilton, complete with rapping, and there’s still multiple role-playing from the same brilliant young cast (some of whom are founding SpitLip members), lots of jazz hands, and a fairly savage parody of elitist British bureaucracy. The audience continues to laugh with bitter familiarity at a group of privileged upper class men, strong on self confidence but fatally weak on everything else, bumbling insensitively and incompetently through an ever-worsening global situation.

There has been a major (non-musical) feature film since then, so the whole bizarre tale is better known to the general public, which perhaps helps this new iteration. But what is more telling and really lifts the whole glorious enterprise to a higher level is that Operation Mincemeat has unlocked a rich seam of emotional integrity that was missing earlier, except for a poignant ballad entitled ‘Dear Jack’ sung by a Home Office secretary pining for a lost pre-war lover. That number is still here, and still exquisitely put over by Jak Malone, but where previously it felt like a welcome oasis of calm amongst all the madness, within the new framework it has acquired much more power.

In another wonderful, heartbreaking development, the show focuses more on the identity of the lost soul whose cadaver is pivotal to the central plot. By acknowledging that here was a real human not just an abstract prop, the show goes into fresh, emotionally charged waters, that actually throw the playful comedy into sharp relief. Hastie weaves the different strands together seamlessly and anybody who, like me, caught the earlier versions and thought the only tears they’d shed at Operation Mincemeat would be of laughter, needs to rethink that assumption. It’s now ultimately deeply moving.

The new gravitas extends to, and informs, the performances. The same five-strong cast remain a versatile, gender-switching bunch, with fine voices, bags of energy and some serious comedy chops. But there’s real, nuanced acting now. Natasha Hodgson as the showboating, self congratulatory Montague seems to especially benefit from this. Previously her take on this fairly ghastly, but undeniably entertaining, individual was an inspired piece of clowning, but now he has a compelling undertow of melancholy, even neediness, that is so much more interesting. A brashly enjoyable comic turn has become a finely wrought portrayal that is arguably even funnier, and it’s pretty much impossible to take one’s eyes off Hodgson.

David Cumming is still essentially manic as eccentric mastermind Cholmondeley but binds all the tics and non sequiturs into a fully realised picture of a genius of a man who lives on his nerves: he is just delightful. Zoë Roberts is riotous as a clueless, “uncommonly sweaty” British attaché adrift in Spain and a gung-ho Ian Fleming forever touting his James Bond idea to his disinterested colleagues, but also finds the truth and compassion in the high powered head of department. Malone is a real find, delivering with broad yet precise brush strokes, roles as diverse as an improbably glitzy pathologist, a hearty American pilot, and a genteel, lonely, unexpectedly touching female civil servant, and he has an uncommonly good voice. Claire-Marie Hall sparkles as a new secretary determined not to be pigeonholed by her sex, and genuinely stops the show with ‘All The Ladies’, a Girl Power anthem of which Beyoncé or indeed the Schuyler Sisters would be proud.

The lyrics are sophisticated and sassy, but now, thanks to Mike Walker’s crisp sound design, they’re fully audible (they weren’t always in earlier versions) as are Steve Sidwell’s impressive harmonies. The myriad of running jokes land much better now. The storytelling is clearer than before, even if the pace and interest still flag slightly after the interval before regrouping for a lavish new finale that manages to be authentically British, utterly flamboyant and ecstatically bonkers.

It’s a total pleasure to see a piece that has grown and developed with each stage of its production history, hitting the West End with a slickness, swagger and bounce that preserves what initially made the piece so special but now renders it fit to take on the world. Everything that worked before (the hip hop dancing Nazi stormtroopers transforming in the blink of an eye to the quietly stoic inhabitants of a Naval submarine, the tangled telephone lines showstopper, Jenny Arnold’s expert choreography, to name a couple of highlights) is still here, but has been augmented and complemented by higher production values, a clearer vision, an inspired variegation of tone, and even more doses of irresistible theatrical chutzpah. Mark Henderson’s inventive lighting ups the ante further, the band led by Joe Bunker sounds terrific, and Ben Stones’s elegantly simple set undergoes a transformation that leaves most of the audience’s jaws on the floor.

Operation Mincemeat remains an ambitious, darkly humorous, highly original new musical that achieves lift off repeatedly and joyously, with some cracking songs and a shrewd brain in it’s dizzy head, but now it’s also a bit of a tearjerker with the quicksilver of real humanity coursing through the ventricles of it’s off-kilter showbiz heart, and I really did not see that coming. Pure exhilaration. Go, and if, like me, you saw it before and thought that was enough, go again.