What’s up everybody?! I’ve been up to a lot since my last blog post a few days ago, including getting some vegan (and non-vegan) fish and chips! Today, despite all of the other things I’ve been doing, I am going to talk a little bit about the show that we saw last night called Operation Mincemeat. It actually has a theme which applies to all you stalkers really well: spying.
Operation Mincemeat is a comedic musical about an actual operation during the Second World War where the British, on the side of the Allied Forces, distracted Germany from the invasion of Sicily by making them believe that they Allies were attacking Sardinia instead.
How would they do this, you ask? Well of course, they floated the dead body of a supposedly dead Allied pilot carrying totally-not-falsified documents and plans of the Allied invasion of Sardinia (which didn’t happen!) so that Hitler would move his troops to Sardinia instead. This plan obviously has a lot of factors that depend basically entirely on chance… The idea that the Germans would actually find the body at all is entirely absurd, when you think of it. Surprisingly, this all worked through a lot of planning and not a small amount of luck.
While I would recommend reading up on this operation, (because it really is interesting; between writing this paragraph and the last one I went on an about 20 minute Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about it!) I am going to talk about the usage of the idea of spying in the play, as well as the function of the actual operation as a theatrical event.
In the play, the character Ewen Montagu is suspected of passing classified information about the operation to his brother, who is a communist spy. It is shown to be a discreet and frowned upon position, obviously, but difficult to detect. By the end of the play, nearly everyone suspects Ewen of spying for the Axis powers, though he is only collecting information to write a history of what the team has done to win the war. Because of this circumstance, it turns out that all of the characters are spying on him as well, which results in a culture of mistrust.
The creation of this team, however, was indeed a theatrical performance. They dressed up this dead man and created an entire life for him, which is what actors do all of the time, though not usually to corpses…I feel like that would be unethical. However, we take a character on a page and decide what their inner life is–what they do when nobody’s looking, how they treat others, and even what they would wear or put into their house. All of these things play into how theatermakers view the world and their craft. What the officers in Operation Mincemeat did was exactly that, though it was more like the improvisation of the character. Similarly, they did it to achieve a purpose, which is what all of theatre is about.
That’s all I’ve got to say about that! I really enjoyed Operation Mincemeat–I’ve said a few times since seeing the show that I wasn’t sure about the concept of a military operation during WWII being presented as a comedic musical at intermission, but by the time the curtain dropped, I was sure. Operation Mincemeat is a masterpiece of very tasteful comedy, and I enjoyed every moment. The pacing and resolution is all so satisfying and definitely was a breath of fresh air. Finally, I know all of you have been waiting for an answer to the question I posed in the title, and I wish I could tell you. I went to Operation Mincemeat specifically to find that out for you, but they couldn’t tell me either. So I just don’t know. Maybe you should ask this guy.
Next up on the blog–I’ll be writing a whole blog post about Borough Market and its food, so if all of you are looking to me for meal inspiration, you’re in for a treat!
CW
Theatre in London U of A 