‘It feels completely unbelievable. And, also, like the cumulation of everything we’ve been working towards for all these years,” says Natasha Hodgson, who along with Zoe Roberts, David Cumming and Felix Hagan make up theatre company SpitLip. They all seem dazed and delighted by the news that their musical, Operation Mincemeat, will be heading to the West End next year, for a run in the Fortune theatre, which has been home to The Woman in Black for the past 33 years.
Operation Mincemeat is a story about an audacious if morally muddy episode in British espionage history. In 1943, in order to persuade the Nazis to divert their forces away from Sicily, two British intelligence officers – Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley – planted falsified documents on the dead body of a homeless man which they dressed as an airman and floated ashore in Spain in the hope that the documents would fall into enemy hands. To make the scenario convincing they manufactured an identity for their airman, who they named Captain William Martin, including a taste for the theatre and a fictional fiancee.
