Operation Mincemeat is, by now, a familiar kind of underdog story in British theatre, though no less remarkable for it. Landing in the West End at the Fortune Theatre in May 2023, where it picked up the Olivier and WhatsOnstage Awards for Best New Musical and racked up dozens of five star reviews on its way to being called the best reviewed show in West End history. From there it transferred to Broadway, has been extended repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic, and is now partway through a genuine world tour taking in stops across the USA, Australia, Canada, China, Mexico and New Zealand. The UK leg brought it to the Theatre Royal Nottingham this week, and on the evidence of press night, the show has lost none of its bite on the road.
The story it tells is drawn from a real, and genuinely strange, piece of Second World War history. In 1943, with the Allies preparing to invade Sicily and needing to convince the Germans they were headed somewhere else entirely, British intelligence dressed a corpse in a stolen identity, filled its pockets with fabricated love letters and false invasion plans, and let it wash up where the enemy would find it, essentially letting a dead man do the work no living soldier could. Operation Mincemeat turns that scheme into a five person, multi-roling farce that never quite lets you forget it is also a thriller, following Ewen Montagu, Charles Cholmondeley, Jean Leslie, Hester Leggatt and Johnny Bevan as they cobble together a deception convincing enough to help turn the tide of the war.
What strikes you first at Nottingham is just how much the show trusts its own set. The design is a brilliant piece of engineering, versatile, dynamic and quietly ingenious, but the production is disciplined enough not to show its full hand early. Its first reality on stage is modest and unassuming, which makes every subsequent reveal land with real surprise as the evening goes on, each new configuration earning a reaction rather than being thrown away for spectacle’s sake. The same restraint runs through the props and furniture, which are handled with real dexterity, filling out scene after scene without ever once looking cumbersome in the actors’ hands. That is as much a credit to the direction as to the design itself, since five performers playing thirty odd characters need every piece of furniture to behave, and here it always does.
The writing is the other great achievement of the evening. Given how much ground the show has to cover, real wartime bureaucracy, an entire fake identity, several overlapping romances and a genuine espionage plot, it would be easy for the book to sag under its own research. Instead it stays remarkably dense without ever feeling superfluous. Almost everything that is explained turns out to matter, every character introduced earns their place in the plot, and by the time the show reaches its final stretch, each of those threads is drawn to a conclusion that feels genuinely satisfying rather than merely tidy. It is a script that rewards close attention, and Nottingham’s press night audience were clearly giving it exactly that.
Musically, the score does not always announce its own connections. The songs rarely lean on obvious reprises or callbacks to tie themselves together, and taken individually they can feel like a set of very good standalone numbers rather than a single unified score. What holds them together instead is character. Each song feels shaped around whoever is singing it, carrying their particular voice and their particular comic or emotional register, and it is the ensemble nature of the piece, everyone folding back into everyone else’s story, that ultimately does the work of stitching the whole thing into a cohesive whole.
None of that would land, though, without a cast capable of carrying it, and this touring company does so with real distinction. On press night, Katy Ellis lead as Ewen Montagu with very strong vocals and a boldness that stops the character ever curdling into a dry procedural presence, giving him enough swagger, and enough vulnerability underneath it, to hold the show’s centre for its full two hours. Charlotte Hanna-Williams brings a consistent, carefully considered performance to Jean Leslie, singing beautifully throughout and resisting any temptation to oversell Jean’s romantic subplot, so that when its emotional beats do arrive, they land with genuine weight rather than manufactured sentiment. Jordan Pearson is a tremendously versatile performer as Hester Leggatt, moving between the show’s broadest comedy and its most sincere, quietest moment without either register ever undercutting the other, which matters enormously given how much of the production’s heart comes to rest on Hester by the second act. Jamie-Rose Monk delivers the strongest character work of the night as Johnny Bevan, with diction sharp enough to cut cleanly through even the evening’s densest, fastest lyrics, and slots into the ensemble’s relentless multi-roling demands as though she has been doing it for years rather than weeks. And Seán Carey brings a wonderful, wholly believable characterisation to Charles Cholmondeley, finding a real person underneath what could easily have been played as pure eccentric comic relief, a choice that pays off handsomely once the character is called on to be genuinely sincere.
Taken together, it is a company working extremely hard to make something this demanding look slick, polished and effortless, and largely succeeding. On this evidence, the UK leg of Operation Mincemeat’s world tour is in very safe hands indeed.
Operation Mincemeat runs at the Theatre Royal Nottingham from Monday 20 July to Saturday 1 August 2026.
Photography throughout from Matt Crockett.
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