Operation Mincemeat review — wartime subterfuge makes a joyous West End musical

Operation Mincemeat

Fortune Theatre, London

Misdirection. It’s one of the staples of stage magic: get your audience to look over here and — zip! — switch objects over there. It was also the principle behind one of the most audacious intelligence operations of the second world war: Operation Mincemeat, in which British intelligence officers planted fake papers on a corpse to fool Hitler and send the Nazis scurrying to Sardinia and Greece while the Allies invaded Sicily.

This joyous spoof musical splices the two together, bringing vaudevillian flair to an irreverent telling of the story. Audacity is the name of the game and SpitLip theatre company does not disappoint. Armed with quick changes, killer lines, fizzing choreography (Jenny Arnold), oodles of charm and even more cheek, a brilliant five-strong cast (Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, Zoë Roberts, Jak Malone and Claire-Marie Hall) march into the West End and style it out.

Most delightfully of all, they manage some subterfuge of their own. Under the guise of daft comedy and outrageous pastiche, they smuggle in a quiet paean to the backstage heroes of the war, not least the homeless man (Glyndwr Michael) who, disguised as a drowned Royal Marines officer, unwittingly played his part in winning the war.

Core to the show is a celebration of the curious crossover between theatre and intelligence subterfuge — disguise, character creation — allied with impish mockery of British snobbery. “We were born to lead,” barks Hodgson’s Ewen Montagu in the opening number, breezing on with the confidence that will enable him to convince sceptical commanding officers and ignore pesky questions about whether it is in any way legal or ethical to commandeer a corpse. The irony is that while Montagu has the brass neck to take on the top brass, it’s the gangling Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming) who dreams up the plot and quick-witted secretary Jean Leslie (Hall) who spots its potential.

The script and songs (written by Cumming, Hodgson, Roberts and Felix Hagan) trip along briskly, laced with a kind of wartime delirium. Musical styles range from Noël Coward through Beyoncé and sea shanties to Hamilton and the show is peppered with affectionate tributes to classic British comedy: the musical revue hat-trick; the droll asides of Dad’s Army.

Originating at the tiny, enterprising New Diorama Theatre, the show has been spruced up for the West End by director Robert Hastie and smartly designed by Ben Stones. The excellent, quick-changing cast do some conjuring of their own: you’d swear there were more than five of them.

But what really makes it is an emotional ambush. Amid all the nonsense, prim spinster secretary Hester Leggett steps forward to help the team compose a letter from the fake officer’s sweetheart and, in the song “Dear Bill”, suddenly reveals her own wartime loss. It’s deeply touching, beautifully delivered by Malone and encapsulates the heart of the show, which is, in the end, about the personal cost of war. Mission very much accomplished.

★★★★☆

To August 19, operationmincemeat.com

The Circle

Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond upon Thames

More cut-glass accents and frightful goings-on in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle and Noël Coward’s The Vortex (reviewed below). Both playwrights also excelled in misdirection, smuggling emotional truths and social critique on to the stage in the guise of drawing-room comedy.

To 1920 first and the charmingly appointed Dorset home of MP Arnold Champion-Cheney (Pete Ashmore) in The Circle. Tom Littler’s production — his first as artistic director of the Orange Tree — boasts two sets of French windows and really does have a character come bouncing in from the tennis court. It’s also bristling with lethal one-liners — “Her soul is as thickly rouged as her face,” mutters one character, darkly, of another.

But while there’s plenty of verbal jousting and fussing over antique furniture, lurking beneath the polish is Maugham’s sharp critique of the limited options for women and the cruelties of a society that could punish you simply for being yourself (Maugham was gay and unhappily married). We learn that Elizabeth (Olivia Vinall), Arnold’s restless young wife, has conceived a fascination with Lady Kitty, Arnold’s estranged mother, who caused a scandal 30 years previously by running off with her lover. Moreover, she has invited Kitty to stay.

Elizabeth imagines a “pale, frail lady in black satin”, but the real thing (a marvellous Jane Asher) is altogether less romantic, bickering with the spectacularly grumpy Lord Porteous (Nicholas Le Prevost, who rumbles and gurgles like an old boiler). Add in Kitty’s ex-husband (Clive Francis) and handsome outsider Teddy (Chirag Benedict Lobo) who is wooing Elizabeth hard, and a crisis looms. Will Elizabeth stay or go?

Littler and his cast deliver Maugham’s dialogue with beautiful comic timing, keeping a light touch while letting the sadness seep out. Asher’s Kitty is very droll — “My hair is not naturally this colour,” she confides, to the surprise of absolutely no one — but reveals unexpected depths once she spots that history might repeat itself. And what’s best about Littler’s staging is the subtlety: Vinall’s Elizabeth doesn’t hate her husband, she just wants something more; Ashmore’s Arnold is not mean, just emotionally insecure.

★★★★☆

To June 17, orangetreetheatre.co.uk

The Vortex

Chichester Festival Theatre, west sussex

That circle of marital misery and unhappy rebellion has become a vortex in Noël Coward’s 1924 play, which caustically reveals a hollowness behind the roaring Twenties. Again we have a one-time beauty, raging against the dying of the light, and we have a mixed-up son. Only here the social set is racier, the wit crisper, the confrontation bleaker and Coward, audaciously, tackles drug use. The big draw of Daniel Raggett’s new staging is the casting of real-life mother and son Lia Williams and Joshua James as the central couple, Florence, and her son, Nicky.

Williams is electric as Florence, a bored socialite terrified of ageing, whose solution to the passage of time is to hook up with young men. The latest, unhappily, turns out to be the ex of Nicky’s new fiancée: the fallout culminates in a major, Hamlet-like showdown between mother and son. Raggett’s staging and Joanna Scotcher’s design pull us into the emotional vortex with them, spinning the stage and gradually stripping away the chic furniture to leave the pair in a miserable void.

Williams and James are terrific: she has an almost manic, nervy energy, flitting about the stage as if perpetual motion could outwit the Grim Reaper; his fragility, jumpiness and pallor speak of the strain of concealing his sexuality and the misery of seeking relief in addiction. Their final encounter, in which he begs for her attention, is distressingly raw. There is lovely quiet work too from Priyanga Burford as Florence’s wise, besotted friend Helen and Hugh Ross as her long-suffering husband.

But there’s a strenuous quality to the production that holds it back. It declares its hand early and some of the comedy feels forced and bleak, so the shock, as the layers peel off, hits less hard. Sometimes a scalpel can be just as lethal as a cleaver.

★★★☆☆

To May 20, cft.org.uk