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.
