‘This is not the World War II I was taught about’: The story behind Operation Mincemeat the musical

Theatre company SpitLip talk to Isobel Lewis about turning ‘Operation Mincemeat’ into a musical comedy for the stage – ‘it’s a British tradition to make fun of the terrible things we do’

The cast of ‘Operation Mincemeat’ (Matt Crockett)

The Second World War mission Operation Mincemeat is one of those stories that is so utterly bizarre, it’s shocking nobody’s made it into a comedy musical before. This operation, to disguise the Allied invasion of Sicily, featured the kind of weird details writers couldn’t make up: fake love letters, rat poison and James Bond author Ian Fleming. Now mining the story for all its comic potential are theatre company SpitLip, who are bringing their stage show Operation Mincemeat to London’s Riverside Studios this spring, following a five-star run at Southwark Playhouse earlier this year. The show arrives in the middle of a Mincemeat glut. There was Ben McIntyre’s 2010 book, while a big-budget historical drama starring Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen is also currently in cinemas – all with the same name.

At a time when the London musical theatre scene is dominated by Broadway exports, jukebox musicals and stage adaptations of films, Operation Mincemeat (the stage show) is an outlier. It was written by a small company of homegrown talent and is full of original songs dense with jokes, wordplay and pop culture references. It’s the work of SpitLip, a theatre company who originally met while the founders were studying together at Warwick University. Operation Mincemeat is their first show under the moniker – before this, they spent 10 years creating comedy with another theatre company, Kill the Beast.

The musical was commissioned in 2019 by New Diorama, a London theatre known for taking a chance on relatively untested emerging talent, off the back of one scene and two songs (“And a very well written pitch document,” Roberts adds with faux indignation). That first run, they were playing to audiences of 80. Now, they have 10 weeks in a 500-seat venue. As I meet SpitLip in a church in north London where they’ve been rehearsing “God That’s Brilliant”, one of the show’s high-octane early group numbers, you can tell they’re excited – if a little exhausted.

SpitLip consists of actors David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoe Roberts, along with musical director Felix Hagan. The trio of actors were all part of Kill the Beast, but found that with every new show they did, more and more original songs found their way into the script. Eventually they set themselves an ultimatum to “stop pretending that we don’t want to write a musical and just write a musical”.

“Just writing a musical”, it turned out, was a harder task than they imagined. They roped in Hagan, deciding that an adaptation was an easier place to start when it came to creating a full-length, two-act show. Nineties revenge comedy Death Becomes Her, children’s novel The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Iain Banks’s cult 1984 teen horror novel The Wasp Factory were all weighed up. Then Hodgson’s brother asked if they’d considered this mission called Operation Mincemeat that he’d heard about on the hugely popular Stuff You Should Know podcast. “I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s not actually that easy? Calm down,” Hodgson says. “[Then] I listened to it and I just thought, f***, this is absolutely correct. He’s bang on here. So annoying.”

It’s the details that make Operation Mincemeat perfect artistic fodder. It was the brainchild of a small group of British intelligence officers, led by Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, and took place in 1943 in an attempt to break Hitler and Mussolini’s hold on Europe by capturing Sicily. To make it seem like the Allied forces were aiming for Sardinia and Greece instead, the officers took the corpse of homeless man Glyndwr Michael, who had died after eating rat poison, and dressed him up as an entirely fictional Royal Marines officer called William Martin.

Forged documents were hidden on his person – among them a photo of MI5 clerk Jean Leslie pretending to be his fiancée, faked love letters, theatre tickets and correspondence from “family” and a receipt for an engagement ring. Oh, and a letter claiming that the British Army was planning to invade Greece. His body was dumped off the coast of Spain (via submarine, of course), causing Germany to send reinforcements to Sardinia and Greece while the Allied forces took Sicily. All in all, “a f***ing crazy, crazy story”.

Half of the details were so bizarre, in fact, that SpitLip had to take them out for fear of the audience not believing them. “They drove the body up to Scotland with an ex-race car driver who was short-sighted but refused to wear his glasses, and he nearly crashed three times,” she explains. “If we put that in, it would feel like Toad of Toad Hall… It’s all true, but after a while, I think people are like, ‘You’re just throwing stuff in to be a madcap comedy.’ A magician also ended up on the cutting room floor.

There was apprehension, however, about the show becoming yet another WWII story. “But then actually once you hear it, you’re like… this is not the World War II, I was taught about,” Cumming says. “It’s not like World War II is precious,” Roberts points out – just look at Blackadder. Hodgson nods. “Right? The great British tradition is to make fun of the terrible things we do.”

From L-R: Spitlip’s Zoe Roberts, Felix Hagan, David Cumming and Natasha Hodgson (Spitlip)

Another sticking point came from whether audiences wanted to hear, yet again, about privileged Etonians falling upwards. But there was a sense that, if they were to be portrayed on stage, SpitLip should be the ones to do it. The cast multirole as characters of all genders and have fun in doing so, with Hodgson’s Montague an overly confident man who strides into rooms crotch first. She refers to the show’s approach to gender as “stealth queerness”, while Cumming recalls audiences telling them that “gender melts away” mid-show.

One of the most touching moments in the show sees Jak Malone sing the song “Dear Bill”, as he pens those fake love letters from the fictional officer’s fiancé. It is simple and tragic, touching and beautiful – yes, a man is playing a woman, but without a hint of irony. The few female characters in the story were “punched up” to have more involved roles, while still acknowledging that “they are working in a time where women can only go so far”.

Operation Mincemeat the film and musical are entirely unrelated, so why do SpitLip think both productions had the idea to tell this story now? The theatre company first came up with the idea in 2017 when “the world was already going pretty badly”, Hodgson says. “Brexit was just going around, Trump was just president... It was this despairing moment for democracy. When all that happens and you feel completely powerless, there was just something very attractive about this tiny story about this group of five people, none of whom were gonna be particularly famous, who just came together and managed to do something that was amazing.”

Cumming is in agreement, adding: “Around that time, all the rhetoric [with] Brexit was people being like, ‘Finally we’ll be free of the EU, back when we were the stand-up moral leaders of the world.’ You’re like” – his voice rises in disbelief – “‘The moral leaders of the world?’ That was never a time, that is a complete myth. The powers that be… nicked a body of a homeless man who clearly no one cared about when he was alive, used his corpse to prop up the establishment to keep it still running… Yes, they did it for a wider, greater good. But we weren’t always playing fairly by the rules.”

Roberts says it’s the “moral ambiguity” of Operation Mincemeat that makes it so compelling. The musical ends with a tribute to Glyndwr Michael to highlight his role in Britain’s victory. “We didn’t want to just tell a war story where it’s like, ‘And the British win because they’re the best and everyone else is rubbish,’” she says. Hodgson agrees, adding: “One of the real dangerous things is going, ‘People who do good stuff are good and people who do bad stuff are bad’... We always say the moral of the show is” – they speak in unison, complete with jazz hands – “‘Iiiiiiit’s complicated!’” That it certainly is. Heaps of fun, though.

‘Operation Mincemeat’ runs at Riverside Studios from 28 April until 9 July