The day is finally here. After an initial run at the New Diorama Theatre, a couple of engagements at Southwark Playhouse (both Little and Large), and a stint at Riverside Studios, SpitLip tonight begin their first preview of Operation Mincemeat at the Fortune Theatre.
The year is 1943 and we’re losing the war. Luckily, we’re about to gamble all our futures on a stolen corpse.
Last week I shared part one of my chat with SpitLip’s Felix Hagan and Zoë Roberts, where we went through subjects including the musical theatre development process and War Magicians – this week we head on to the likes of Mincefluencers, and – yes – Colin Firth.
Several performances have already sold out and the rest of the tickets are disappearing fast – but I guarantee that after reading both parts of this interview you’re going to want to see the show, so I’d advise signing up to their mailing list as that gives you access to additional seats & standing tickets.
You have your orders…
Photo credit: Nathan Chandler
I guess you’re still tweaking in preparation for the West End – maybe adding new songs, or changing them up a bit?
Felix Hagan: I think, over the course of the many runs that we’ve done, we’ve been honing and honing and honing – and thinking “is every single second of this telling the story, moving the plot along, and creating the spectacle & emotion that we want it to?”. I think we’ve got to the point now where it’s… I’m not going to use the ‘F’ word, but…
Zoë Roberts: Don’t say it, don’t say it! It’s not finished. It’s not going to be finished until we die! No, we’re really hoping it is going to be finished by the time we open in May. We’ve done so many iterations, partly because it’s comedy but also because the audience plays such a big part in this. You don’t make work in a silo, so every time we’ve created it we’ve been gauging responses, we’ve been seeing how it feels – you get a sense of how it plays just by being in it, but you also get that feedback from the audience. You also kind of know as writers in your gut what isn’t working, so while we’ve probably done most of the big changes to the foundation of the show in the last couple of years, it’s now about cranking everything up and finding that last five, ten, fifteen percent to make sure, like Felix said, that every beat is hitting, everything is working as hard as it possibly can, so that we don’t have a minute that we’re not happy with. We were intending to do that work last summer at Riverside Studios, so that we could come to the West End saying “Boys, we’ve got it!” but unfortunately Dave (one of the writers & performers) managed to fall off his bike, because he’s an idiot, and broke his collarbone; that meant that we spent our scant rehearsal period frantically rehearsing in a replacement for the character of Cholmondeley, so it kind of meant all of our re-tooling time went out of the window while we tried to teach a poor, poor man a full two-act musical in about three days! So it means that we still have some of that work to do. It meant that last year we were still performing some versions of things that we knew weren’t quite right, which is obviously very frustrating, so we’re so excited to get in the rehearsal room, to get into previews, and just do that final little turning of the screws. And by God we hope it will be finished by May. If it doesn’t, I’ll see you in Bermuda – I’ll be off!
One of the things that I really like about the show is. with you having such a small cast. is that you play lots of different roles and lots of different characters – that’s part of the charm of it. Do you have a favourite of the many that you play?
ZR: That’s a really tricky one. One of our Mincefluencers has informed me that I play the most characters in the show – which is very helpful because I haven’t done the maths – so I do a lot of the jumping around. I get the best job, because I get to be the straight guy who has a lot of power and brings a lot of weight to some of the scenes, but I also get to play a bunch of idiots, which is my favourite thing to do in the world. One of the characters that I play is Ian Fleming, that Ian Fleming – basically, in my head he’s an eight-year-old schoolboy who’s just really, really excited about the idea of James Bond. Getting to do that every night is just letting my full inner idiot fly! So that brings me a lot of joy.
That must be another one where people think you’re making it up, and that Ian Fleming can’t possibly have done that?
ZR: Yeah, and he really was involved! It’s a slightly convoluted version, but he was one of the first people to think of the plan of Operation Mincemeat, using a corpse to create misinformation with the enemy. He was part of Military Deception going into the war, so he was baked into the story. It’s just another insane part of the sprawling world of Operation Mincemeat, so we couldn’t not put him in! That would’ve been too cruel.
“I also get to play a bunch of idiots, which is my favourite thing to do in the world.”
Zoë Roberts
The big thing last year was that the film version came out in the middle of you working on the musical – I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet? What did you think of the people who were playing your characters?
ZR: None of us have seen it, I think we’re too… We can’t put another version of this story in our heads while we’re still doing our version. The matrix will collapse! I think the thing that is really good for us is that it’s put Operation Mincemeat a bit more on the map and people have heard of it a bit more, and thanks to all of their budget on big posters and buses people know the phrase Operation Mincemeat, so we’ll take it! But also, I think it’s essential that theirs is just a serious retelling of this World War Two story, so it’s not trying to do the same thing that ours is, which is really great. If they’d made the world’s best comedic film with Colin Firth and Matthew McFadyen, we’d be really screwed! We’re really happy that another version is out there. Would you agree, Felix?
FH: Yeah. I thought it was really weird that they had a man playing Monty… It’s wonderful – like you say, getting that story out there and not having it be in competition with us, given the tone that they took, it’s a massive blessing, really.
ZR: And I imagine, not having seen it, that they’ve struggled even more than us with how much insanity that they’ve had to strip out in order to deliver a serious film. So good luck to them!
Operation Mincemeat runs at the Fortune Theatre from 31 March – 8 July 2023. Tickets are available online or via the box office.
Featured image credit: Matt Crockett
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