Operation Mincemeat
- Robert Beale
- 19 hours ago
- 3 min read
SpitLip (David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoe Roberts)
Rodeo Productions and Avalon
Lowry, Salford
February 16-28, 2026: 2 hrs 40 mins
(Also Bradford Alhambra April 6-11; Lyceum Sheffield, April 13-25; Storyhouse Chester, May 4-9; Grand Opera House York, June 1-6; Theatre Royal Newcastle, June 22-27; New Theatre Hull, July 6-11; Leeds Grand, September 7-12; Victoria Theatre Halifax, October 26-31, and other venues)
My dad, who served in Eighth Army Signals from 1942-1944, was quite proud of the fact that he was one of the few people in on the secret of the actual Operation Mincemeat as the Allies prepared to invade Sicily in 1943.
Mincemeat was only a part of a wider deception, using bogus troop movements and radio traffic to indicate an invasion through the Balkans, or in the western Mediterranean: anywhere but where the real landings would be.
Fake radio signals were as much a part of the scheme as the invented “Captain Martin”, whose body was arranged to be washed up on the Spanish coast with faked secret plans on his body.
The story, told as The Man Who Never Was in the 1950s book by its real-life coordinator, Ewen Montagu, also in the subsequent film, and more recently in the film starring Colin Firth, is so well known that this feted musical version – which began a UK and world tour last night at Salford’s Lowry after the West End and Broadway – doesn’t need to do much more than go over familiar ground in story terms.
What has made its success, though, is the sense that the quiet brilliance of young British intelligence staff in the bowels of the War Office in 1943 is being replicated in the crazy, Goon-ish way we see it enacted and sung about today.
This Operation Mincemeat started as a modest, fringe-type show, full of what you might call undergraduate humour. Now, with the resources of big showbiz, it hasn’t lost that zaniness.
It’s not a musical classic: the songs have smart lyrics and jolly tunes, some of them close enough to the period they’re set in to sound like pastiche (Roll out the Barrel is a ditty from that era whose melody occasionally comes to mind); the cross-dressing is amusing and almost reminiscent of traditional panto; and Jenny Arnold’s choreography is so unsophisticated it becomes quite sophisticated in the end.
But it’s all a lot of fun, and the direction skills of Robert Hastie (who created it for the West End) and his team shine through - bless ‘em all… the long and the short and the tall, as the wartime favourite says.
The five-strong troupe, who all specialise in quick changes for their multiple roles, were certainly varied in body shape. Holly Sumpton (as Montagu and others), Sean Carey (as Charles Cholmondeley and others), Jamie-Rose Monk (as Jonny Bevan and others, including a scarcely-plausible Ian Fleming, who gets an early name-check for his role in the wartime wheeze) and Charlotte Hanna-Williams (as Jean Leslie and others) are all irreproachable.
But I found a special admiration for Christian Andrews (as Hester Leggatt and others): his Dear Bill song takes things to another level as it wends towards its half-way mark, and marks a point at which the more thoughtful side of the show looms larger. “Small flashes of joy are all any of us can hope for” is a wonderful, Coward-esque line that lights up the experience of being in the uncertain world of war (even if Jean’s “I’ve got this” is a terrible anachronism – nobody said that in 1943).
So let’s not forget that the thing about war is that people die, in large numbers. My dad survived; my uncle didn’t. It’s ironic that this Press night should have fallen on February 24, 2026 – just four years after another merciless conflict began in Europe.
Is war just about clever japes? Ask any Ukrainian.
More info and tickets here
