It’s a hoot – and a marvel. It is also one of the surprise survivors of the pandemic-stricken theatre. A show that looked like a caper with a cult following is on the brink of commercial success.
Hurrah! Operation Mincemeat has moved into the Fortune theatre, haunted for more than 30 years by The Woman in Black. Its rise, in an era of juggernaut musicals, is flabbergasting. The creation of the multitasking, multigifted young company SplitLip, it opened four years ago at the tiny, dynamic New Diorama theatre in London; it was by far the smallest, though not the least vibrant entry in my Top 10 shows of 2019. It had an apparently unlikely musical subject: the second world war decoy operation, involving a corpse and fake papers, set up by MI5 to persuade the German military the allies were about to go into Sardinia, not Sicily.
