OPERATION MINCEMEAT
Book, Music and Lyrics by
David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, Zoë Roberts
Directed by Robert Hastie
Golden Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
I remember British intelligence officer Euan Montagu’s war memoir, The Man Who Never Was, from way back in Junior High, when it was offered as a selection of the Scholastic Book Club, in the days when Scholastic offered their own reprint editions of popular titles. So when I heard about the new(ish) British musical, Operation Mincemeat, and the only-slightly-less recent film of that name, and read what both were about, I immediately wondered if they recounted the same historical story; and of course they do.
And that story tells how, during WWII, British intelligence fabricated a British officer—life, loves, career, backstory—found a corpse to match, made him appear to be a downed pilot handcuffed to a briefcase containing secret military plans, and sent him afloat near the coast of neutral Spain, to be discovered there and, via known corruptible channels, reported about to the German high command…to “Herr Hitler” himself…thus tricking the Nazis into redirecting their troops to Greece, leaving fascist-occupied Italy vulnerable to Allied attack. It led to one of the war’s most consequential military victories and was among the boldest, riskiest and most legendary gambits in the annals of international espionage.
Montagu’s 1953 memoir begat a highly popular, very soberly patriotic 1956 film, also called The Man Who Never Was, its award-winning screenplay by Nigel Balchin. Decades later, the event caught the fancy of British historian Ben Macintyre—fantastic true stories of master criminals and spies a specialty—and he wrote a much-expanded and further-researched recounting of the event and its participants, his 2010 book named for the operation itself. This led to the aforementioned 2021 Neflix film, screenplay by Michelle Ashford, which put equal emphasis on the interpersonal drama; it was less sober than somber, but not short on procedural suspense.
None of these is the direct source of the musical, which takes the wealth of known info and puts it through its own particular filter…or perhaps the word is strainer. Pun intended. Because, save for a few tentpole moments, it’s neither sober nor somber. It means to be flat-out funny. The authorship of both script and score is the British comedy quartet group Split Lip, who are David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts.
And owing to the musical’s success in several developmental British venues, leading to a West End engagement that’s still running, and its importation to Broadway, with four of its five-member debut cast intact (three members of Split Lip, one additional original, one replacement)—and owing to the reaction of the audience on the Friday night performance I attended—there are many who indeed laugh the laughs prolifically. Which is not to be minimized.
But with that noted, I was far less amused than I expected to be. As was my companion of the evening—which is immaterial except for my not having been alone; the following may suggest into which camp you’d find yourself.
The first set of reasons was right on the surface:
The show’s structural sensibility is very British Music Hall; one could argue that the libretto is really a series of sequential sketches, punctuated by specialty numbers, physical hijinks and running gags, with a few moments of leavening seriousness (and I’ll get back to those). The show’s stylistic sensibility is a mash-up of holiday panto and Monty Python: the cast of five contains three women, two men, all of whom have one key male or female role, not necessarily of their own gender, and play several others, likewise often involving gender-swapping. In the purest sense, I have no problem with this (though I’ll nitpick about it, also later).
The second set of reasons builds upon the first:
The music hall treatment made the storytelling feel—to me—dishonest. Not intentionally. But collaterally. Even unwittingly. The player-creators clearly have much respect for the significance of the wartime triumph and the personnel who pulled it off; and they just as clearly mean their musical romp as an affectionate homage, since the affair did have enough ironic twists and turns to qualify as perilously near farce; I’ll even go as far as to say that the historical Operation Mincemeat seems to have become a point of English national pride, and that among the musical’s objectives is to celebrate the gambit’s achievement. Fair enough, and I impugn no one’s motives.
But while politicians, policies and their public gaffes are fair targets, the men and women who executed this particular wartime deception don’t readily deserve being treated satirically. Or when not satirically, reductively. In reality, these were not people who chose to live life under public scrutiny. You can argue that any dramatic treatment of real lives and real events is perforce reductive and selective, and that many fondly regarded ones involving lives lived under the radar (and over it) are downright liberal with the truth…and I’d be unable to counter with an all-purpose response…but giving the Fractured Fairy Tale treatment to these heroic people who were, except among their colleagues, anonymous and desired the anonymity, feels like a misapplication of technique.
Putting that aside, let’s get to the technique itself. With all the multiple parts-playing and Monty Pythonesque/panto stylings, there sure is a lot of it, and a lot of it is impressive. The intelligence mastermind running the op is now a parody of the male masterspy trope—played by a woman (Natasha Hodgson). Head of Operations is a not-quite-as-parodic riff on the tolerant but severe male boss—played by a woman (Zoë Roberts). There’s the super-efficient, older female secretary-assistant with a matriarchal core—played by a man (Jak Malone). And the younger secretary with hidden depth and resourcefulness who has the requisite renegade perkiness (West End replacement Claire-Marie Hall). These four manage the Python-esque tightrope walk of playing extreme characterizations without sacrificing what I’ll call Verisimilitude of the Bizarre. But the balance is often shattered by David Cumming giving an extreme parody of the office-geek trope as the masterspy’s Number Two, who actually devised the plan. His delivery comes from the school of SEE HOW COMICALLY INEPT I AM! HEAR MY FUNNY VOICE! But to be fair, I can’t objectively say how much of this is the actor and how much the role as conceived—not without seeing others who have since replaced him in the London company, and what they brought of themselves to what has to be a set template. But I can say, after exposure to numerous of the Goes Wrong parodies—where variously delivered comic exaggeration only enhances the sense of real human foible and vulnerability—Cumming’s performance strikes me as a rent in the fabric. Withal, direction by Robert Haste moves briskly apace on the minimalist set—there’s a certain degree of quick-audio cut Goon Show radio humor too—admirably following the theatre games philosophy of creating more with less.
For a hit musical, the score is not nearly as varied as it might be. It sounds like party-stuff of committee design, with a lot of rap-style patter and Charleston-jazz scatting but with real words. As it happens, my hearing loss handicap proved an ironic blessing: Because I was telecoil-streaming the sound system audio mix—including the individually body-mic’ed actors—directly into my hearing aids, and because top-grade hearing aids are lots better at smooth-sound reproduction than the generic headsets most theatres provide—I was able to understand every word with informative clarity. In what manner informative? Well, I was surrounded by people who said they had enormous difficulty understanding the lyrics, including my companion. And as a theatre lyricist who has also taught the craft, my being able to hear them let me know that it was the fault of neither the sound system nor the performances, but the lyrics themselves. And to be certain thereafter, I took a more concentrated listen via the cast album.
Patter is extremely difficult to write effectively: merely to properly-accent syllables isn’t enough; nor is it enough to additionally make sure the locution is easy on tongue, teeth, jaw, so you can rapid-fire the words out without muscle strain that hinders articulacy; those are your bare minimum requirements.
The big trick, beyond “mechanical” craft, is that the rhetoric has to be properly accented, and the information properly parcelled out. There’s no hard and fast overall principle to achieving such fine tuning; it’ll differ according the things like scan, rhythm, melody, context, purpose…but in the service of covering dramatic ground, lyric time usually moves more slowly than dialogue time. In most cases, when you examine a really effective patter lyric, you’ll discover that, stanza for stanza, you’re moving forward only one idea at a time; the rapid-fire fills it out with wit, imagery and detail, but as in an effective magic trick, that, plus the energy of the actor(s) is the misdirection; it gives the illusion of information barrelling forward, when in reality, it’s moving at a modest trot. However, in Operation: Mincemeat, the patter is too often discursive or parenthetical. And though the rhymes are usually perfect, they’re not always so…and those are road-bumps because, even if a less-particular listener is inclined to give near-rhymes a pass, now and again, every imperfect rhyme in patter is another enemy of clarity; the listener is either distracted by the discrepancy or subconsciously trying to pair the unrelated sounds, which pulls concentration off the thread.
The one notable exception to the musical freneticism is a freely composed waltz musicalizing the famous letter written to the invented pilot, as if from a wartime lover, in reality composed by the matriarchal assistant (and performed touchingly by Mr. Malone). It lands with more resonance than anything in the show—whether you dig the show or not—because it’s the one sustained moment of genuine emotional sincerity, and its blessedly unarticulated but clear subtext is that she’s drawing from a heartbreak in her own past.
All this being said, I circle back to the notion that I may not be your best consumer barometer here. Because for me, Operation Mincemeat occupies an odd niche: lacking a better nomenclature, I’ll call it “wavelength comedy”; it’s not unequivocally funny for everybody, but something about it has struck a resonant chord: right place, right time, right story, right treatment, right casting. Right alchemy.
Yet, for all its rightness, I found I was not among those resonating with it. At least not fully. But what is unequivocal is my having been surrounded by fellow audience members who were. And it makes no sense to rail against that. Nor do I wish to. I can only acknowledge it.
The success or failure of the operation is up to you…