Spitlip, the company founded by members of supernatural theatre-comedy trailblazers Kill the Beast to produce modern comedy musicals with a genre-destroying contemporary soundtrack, are proud to announce their first ever production Operation Mincemeat.
It’s 1943 and the outcome of World War II is still on a knife-edge. In a bid to break the deadlock and swing momentum in their favour, his majesty’s armed forces resort to perhaps the most bonkers but ingenious misdirection and misinformation campaign in military history.
Determined that the Nazi Abwehr not discover their impending invasion of Sicily, the British dressed the dead body of a homeless man in an Officer’s uniform, created a false identity for him, put plans for a fictional invasion of Greece and Sardinia in his pocket and floated him off the south coast of Spain, in the hope the neutral Spanish government would share the information he carried with the Nazis…
The crack team of allied officers was led by the level headed Johnny Bevan, with a surrounding cast including the bombastic, immensely charming (if distressingly rich) Ewen Montagu whose unflappable self-assurance was instrumental in pushing through such a far fetched ploy, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Fleming – future author of much more credible stories including the James Bond novels and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Major Jasper Maskylene – a stage musician from a legendary line of Victorian illusionists, and Sir Bernard Spilsbury, a pathologist who, legend had it, could “smell” murder.
One of the most outrageous true stories of the Second World War, perhaps even the last century, will explode into life once more with the help of glorious original songs kicking off with a banger about ‘sexy fascism’ before acosting a host of other genres ranging from musical theatre to pop to Glam Rock.
All of this will be imbued with the signature blackly absurdist wit associated with The Stage Edinburgh Award, The Peter Brook Festival Award and the Manchester Studio Theatre Award winners Kill the Beast, whose previous productions include werewolf detective thriller He Had Hairy Hands, comic book sci-fi horror Don’t Wake the Damp, and cinematic psychological thriller Director’s Cut.
Operation Mincemeat is at New Diorama Theatre 14th May – 15th June 2019.
