Operation Mincemeat is a comical look at Spycraft, perhaps being the oddest and most macabre look at espionage I’ve seen to date. Mincemeat portrays spying as more of a prolonged group project than one individual On Her Majesty’s Secret Service going to foreign lands with a License To Kill. Its version of spying takes away the frills and lands us on an absurd plot that had no right to work as well as it did. While my frame of reference for real-world spying isn’t amazing, it certainly hits a happy medium of making fun of real-world spying but also portraying it semi-accurately given its story’s real-world basis. With as many references as there were to Ian Fleming and his Bond novels, in particular, his writing Dr. No, it’s almost as if the show was trying to highlight the disconnect between the spying done here and those in the likes of Fleming’s novels. Giving us a more realistic look than something like that which was very adjacent to reality but embellished for the sake of drama and action. Realistic or not, I adored the show, plus we had A View to Kill which meant my eyes were glued to the stage the whole time.
While the same level of theatrics may be present in the theater we know and love today with dead bodies taking a Skyfall, classified documents For Your Eyes Only, and enough character work to scare The Living Daylights out of any actor, I don’t think anything the characters did could exactly be considered a form of theater. Was it an amazing act of deception? Yes, but at the end of the day, I’m very much of the opinion theater is done as a performance where the audience knowingly suspends their disbelief. While I fully see how this fits the criteria for being a performance, with a story, and a level of creative exigence behind it I think it’s more so a very creative trick. That being said, the story itself makes for a great musical which has made me, not dissimilar to Montagu’s brother who came From Russia With Love, very interested to see a film version.
Overall, I adored Operation Mincemeat. It’s a show with a Goldeneye for detail in both its technical and performance aspects which left me on the edge of my seat watching the drama and comedy unfold. When it comes to my praise, The World Is Not Enough. All I can say is I’ll remember the experience when I’m a Spectre and apologize dearly to anyone who’s reading this that I committed so hard to this bit, I’ve written stupider things though so I’ll Never say Never Again.
Theatre in London U of A 