By: James Banyard
“So, we’ve got to lie about where we strike, so we can fool the Reich!” sing the MI5 ensemble in the opening number of Operation Mincemeat, playing this week in the Lyric. Its one of hundreds of devilish rhymes this evening that you are going to love with this show, I promise.
It’s 1943, the war is going badly, and the only plan left is to gamble everything on a dodgy corpse.
The premise is brilliantly simple, and historically true: the Allies want to invade Sicily, but it’s crawling with German troops. Their plan is to drop a dead body with fake invasion plans on a Spanish beach, hoping it will reach the Nazis. Whether or not it works is the engine that drives the show, and unless you’re a history buff, I won’t spoil the outcome.
Operation Mincemeat is the improbable, hilarious, and true story of one of the Second World War’s strangest deceptions. The show, a grassroots phenomenon, began life on the fringe in 2019 from small theatre company SpitLip, transferred to the West End in 2023, (and Broadway shortly after) and is now touring the country, landing this week at the Theatre Royal Plymouth. The Guardian called it “joyfully smart”, which it is, satirising a class of Eton-educated “heroes” whose arrogance somehow came up with one of the greatest military deceptions in history.
The central relationship is the odd-couple pairing of nerdy scientist Charles Cholmondeley (Morgan Phillips) and overconfident Eton alumnus Ewen Montagu (Holly Sumption). As Monty puts it, the plan will work with “your brains and my literally everything else”.
The music blitzkriegs through issues of class entitlement, gender roles, and the ethics of using a corpse without proper consent. The show skewers upper-class British entitlement while consistently reminding us that even in a world of grand deception, the rules still matter. The women and the outsiders are the ones who keep things together; a knowing joke tells us the government is as much of a mess now as it was then.
Musically, the highlights are the high-energy ensemble numbers: the throbbing bass of the disco scenes and the terrific grindcore-Nazi routine that opens Act Two are particularly memorable. One scene, intercutting between a submarine crew and the team back in London, has pace and is cinematic in its ambition.
My favourite character is a minor one: Hasledene (Jamie-Rose Monk), a perpetually sweating, bumbling British contact in Spain. He’s a perfect buffoon in a linen suit and straw hat, a walking embodiment of Britishness abroad.
The Plymouth audience loved it; on a Monday night, the Lyric looked full. Operation Mincemeat is irreverent, sharp, and thoroughly entertaining and comparisons to Mel Brooks are well earned. The glitzy ending is a blinding collage with call backs to all the characters and conflicts and will leave you humming and chuckling all the way to the car park, but not before a final nod to the real man behind plan, Glyndwr Michael. Stay to the end to pay your respects.