So let’s talk about Operation Mincemeat, the little show that could that has single-handedly revived my self-identification as a musical theatre nerd. Beginning pre-pandemic at the new works powerhouse New Diorama, Operation Mincemeat developed over a series of runs at fringe venues before improbably arriving on the West End for a now twice-extended run that I hope very much will become a long-term residency.
Key to the show’s originality and charm is its semi-satirical take on a bizarre World War 2 operation to trick the Nazis into evacuating Sicily in order to allow the Allies to invade, using false information planted on the body of a supposed deceased pilot— really just a corpse dressed up for the job— washed ashore in Spain. Spit Lip, the creative team behind the musical, astutely recognised that on the one hand, this is a story of British ingenuity and wartime daring, and on the other hand, that it’s a completely insane and absurd thing to have allowed to happen, and probably in a department or indeed world that wasn’t being run by the poshest weirdos in Britain, somebody would have stopped it.
Therefore also key to the show’s comedy and themes is, well, the posh weirdos in question, a core cast of self-involved men who are too insulated by their own privilege to fully recognise that they are all a bit insane, and so is this plan. During the show’s development, Spit Lip spoke about their struggle to depict a cast of characters that is by necessity dominated by men who ‘all look the same’, and one of the emotional cores of the show rests in acknowledging the overlooked contributions of the women of the War Office.
The duo at the head of the show and the scheme are Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, the arrogant weirdo who does the talking and the timid weirdo with the good ideas. It’s Ewen— called ‘Monty,’ naturally— who is the shining emblem of masculine privilege, short-sighted and fully convinced of his innate greatness: ‘Fortune favours courage / And a fortune’s what I’ve got,’ goes the pitch-perfect opening number. While bumbling Cholmondeley undergoes something of a transformation over the course of the show, Monty remains resolutely himself, confidence unassailable, ultimately affirmed in his devout belief that ‘when you write the book / …you’re off the hook’ for the moral implications of your actions. All’s fair in love and war, as long as you win. It’s a comic type and narrative structure that relies on Monty standing as an unchanging emblem of the system that the show aims to mock, the epitome of privilege that goes unshaken by any apparent adversity.
All of that to say, I understand structurally why Spit Lip couldn’t quite figure out how to incorporate the historical fact that the actual Ewen Montagu was Jewish, something the show does not mention. However, I can’t help but be disappointed by the missed opportunity. As a friend noted as we chatted after our viewing, Jewish people get precious few opportunities to be heroes in World War 2 dramas. However, Operation Mincemeat is such a strong and compelling example of historical storytelling because of its tight narrative and laser focus. It avoids the sprawling biopic pitfalls of trying to cover every element of an era or event by so relentlessly abiding by its precise thematic interests— and is very funny in the process because it recognises that not every character can or should be complicated or ‘redeemed.’ These are the kinds of storytelling decisions that have to be made in order to chop history into exciting and accessible narrative portions.
In the musical, Montagu is neither liked nor trusted by his superior officer, Johnny Bevan, who (probably rightly) considers Montagu a meretricious idiot. Monty spends most of the play under suspicion by the rest of the cast of stealing classified documents (he is) and potentially acting as a Russian spy (he isn’t; his brother seems to be, a fact that gains essential clarity and context when you know the brothers are Jewish). In the show as it exists, these failings are commentaries on Monty’s privilege. But if Montagu is not in fact an unalloyed insider, someone who has ridden his privilege as far as it can take him despite a distinct lack of brains— if he might, in fact, be a wealthy elite who even so can never quite be fully on the inside, who might always have something to prove in an antisemitic country and era—Spit Lip may have felt bound to address those nuances, thus potentially adding a weight to the character that the comic structure could not support.
That said— and again, I can only speculate— I strongly suspect that Spit Lip were also stymied in addressing Montagu’s Judaism by a combination of fears of ‘bad representation’ and narrow stereotypes about Jewish characters and people. There is no need to turn Montagu’s Judaism into an explicit referendum on the complex role of Jewish elites in British society, or even have it be a topic that he— a superficial, silly person as written in the musical— takes particularly seriously. I wonder if the weight of the idea of Representation scared Spit Lip away from the fact that every Jewish person has a different relationship to their religion and culture, and Monty’s personality and journey through the story need not change at all for him to still be explicitly acknowledged as Jewish— and for the audience to then draw their own conclusions about how that may or may not be influencing his reckless, narcissistic behaviour and his fanatical desire to be the man who takes down Hitler. It could, in fact, be a very exciting opportunity to invite gentile audiences to imagine a very different kind of Jewish response to the trauma of World War 2, to expand their palette of stereotypes about what a Jewish character can and should be. For example, that he can still be the butt of the jokes. A minority can simply be a character, not a Representation.
I keep returning to this topic in my mind because I think it’s such an interesting example of the decisions that have to be made in fictionalising history. Spit Lip have made a good musical precisely because they were rigorous and ruthless in remaining focused on the elements of the story that interested them and fit their themes— but in this specific instance, adding in this one extra, accurate note need not have disrupted the story as much as they may have feared.