By: Jocelyn Knorr

‘Operation Mincemeat’ is the invention of musical comedy group SpitLip, (comprised of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts). This bombastic little show has enraptured audiences in London and beyond. But much more lurks beneath the surface of this West End sensation, and it would be a disservice not to bring it to light.

‘Operation Mincemeat’ is nearly inescapable if you’ve ever interacted with the theatre corner of the internet; countless people post photos in front of the yellow-illuminated Fortune Theater, or the yellow curtain dubbed the “spaghetti curtain” by fans.

The soundtrack—blending 1940s instruments with modern, almost Beyoncé-esque pop music—has over 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

And the story’s certainly more than enough to capture the imagination—it’s a true story harkening back to the Second World War about a crack team of intelligence experts and administrators who made a man out of thin air, an identity to legitimize a commandeered corpse left on the shore of Spain, carrying documents implying a future Allied incursion into occupied Europe via Sardinia and Greece. These forged plans made Italy redirect its troops to the areas it thought would be affected, while the Allies were free to march into Sicily. The war movie practically writes itself; and thanks to SpitLip, it has. But, it also contains some clever expectation subversion that you might not find unless you’re looking.

The typical conventions of a movie from the “war story” genre are as follows; our protagonist, an often incredibly self-assured man, gets his mission from an authority figure, assembles a team, and sets out to do what he has to do. Typically, the mission has some kind of crisis in the final hour. ‘Operation Mincemeat’ follows this convention very well—our cocky, self-assured young protagonist (Ewen Montagu) receives a mission from an authority (Colonel Bevan, the man running the War Office. He tasks his agents to come up with a plan that will reroute Axis troops away from Sicily), assembles a team (takes Charles Cholmondeley and Jean Leslie under his wing, a nervous, socially-awkward man from R&D and a young woman desperate to do more for the war than make tea, respectively) endures a third-act crisis (mistakes in the orders regarding the forged paperwork) and achieves his goal in the end.

But there’s alterations to it, especially in the case of our protagonist. Monty starts the play by talking Charles into letting Monty hijack his plans, and turns out to be so self-centered that he’s writing a movie about himself and his involvement in the incredibly top-secret plan. He’s accomplishing this via smuggling eyes-only files out of MI5 headquarters and handing them over to his brother, a suspected Russian spy. By taking the typical flaws of the war story protagonist and exaggerating them, a magnifying glass is held up to the whole genre.

There’s also the fact that it takes place within the War Office. The characters are safe behind their desks; they are in the privileged position of experiencing the glory of being part of the war without actually having to risk their lives. This is reflected upon by Colonel Bevan, who speaks almost with guilt about the fact that they are the ones making the strategic decisions, but the young men of England are the ones who will suffer the consequences. This is unusual for the war story genre that ‘Operation Mincemeat’ parodies and operates within, but the musical shows incredible sympathy towards the civilians and regular soldiers who are put in harm’s way.

Another aspect in which ‘Operation Mincemeat’ shows this sympathy is regarding the corpse that’s key to the plot. Monty brags about how easy it was to get and how the fact that the man it used to be was “just some tramp,” means less paperwork—but rather than impressed, the team is horrified, both at the idea of using someone’s dead body without permission and the callous attitude he seems to have about it. It would be easy to crack another war joke here, to satirize the British military or the common view of military men, but they don’t. Every step of the way, they choose to remind us that he used to be a man, and the unauthorized use of his corpse is a violation.

This culminates in the final lines of the musical, where they tell us the man’s real name and what his story was; Glyndwr Michael, a young man from Wales who came to London when he fell on hard times. By exhibiting this sympathy and extending  a hero’s remembrance to everyone, the whole musical drives home the fact that everyone has value, everyone deserves to be honored as contributors to history—even those who served without knowing it.