Trying to get a sense of all London theatre in one mad, weeklong dash—you can get to nine shows in seven days if you put your mind to it—is a fool’s errand. Casting my mind back, I am left mainly with an impression of people surging noisily in and out of velvet rooms.
My far-and-away favorite production—and a complete surprise to me—was the musical “Operation Mincemeat,” at the Fortune Theatre, written by the collective SpitLip: David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts. The title refers to an actual 1943 war maneuver, in which British intelligence disguised a corpse as a downed pilot from the Royal Marines, complete with a briefcase full of phony documents, and set him afloat to wash up on the Spanish coast. Sober-minded accounts of the caper—a book by Ben MacIntyre, a 2021 film—could only gesture to the endeavor’s “They did what?” absurdity, but SpitLip has realized that nothing actually separates peak M.I.5 spycraft from amateur theatricals, both historically the province of jolly-oh, old-boys-together Oxbridge types.
SpitLip has been working on its brainchild since 2019, developing it in various smaller theatres before launching it on the West End, but four years of polishing hasn’t clouded its sense of freshness and risk. (It helps the heisty mood that the performers onstage seem to feel as though they’re getting away with something.) Every night, five actors—drawn from nine—play more than a dozen characters, and you’re never entirely sure which configuration you’re going to get. (I saw Cumming, Roberts, Christian Andrews, Holly Sumpton, and Claire-Marie Hall.) “Mincemeat” presents itself as pure up-from-the-Fringe wackadoodle merriment, but the show is also a strategic feint. It distracts you with silliness and with lickety-split lyrics in a Lin-Manuel Miranda-esque mode: “It’s time for ambition, time to show you’ve got vision / We’re the best brains in Britain, now listen to this!” All the time, though, it’s moving its key emotional artillery into line.
The musical concerns itself, at a deep level, with the dead body. Who was he? Intelligence boffins ignore his humanity, in the same way that they brush aside the abilities of their female colleagues and the perils of the submariners who have to sneak their decoy past German U-boats. And so, in two gorgeous numbers, all the manic jollity disappears. First, a quiet secretary (Andrews, an otherworldly tenor) contributes a fake love letter to the pilot’s dossier, which, as she sings detail after detail, starts to sound distressingly real. And, later, when the toffs toast one another on a job well done, the submarine crew—played by the same actors—remove their caps for the frozen, anonymous corpse below. “If it’s down, it’s down together / if it’s up, it’s up as one,” they sing in the cold blue silence, and a comedy that has been cheerfully dismantling jingoism builds a stirring vision of real fellowship in its place.
Oddly enough, “Operation Mincemeat” was the only musical I saw on a conventional proscenium stage. There’s a passion for in-the-round performance right now in London: perhaps audiences are eager to come close. (The Playhouse Theatre has even been structurally reconfigured for a new “Cabaret.”) The most successful of these stagings is Nicholas Hytner’s inventive revival of “Guys and Dolls” (music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows), at the Bridge, in which some theatregoers sit in tiers, while down on the floor a hundred others are herded this way and that by crew members costumed as New York City cops. The stage itself rises and falls in sections, and each time people settle at a platform’s edge their upturned faces look like the dazzled faithful at a concert.
The resulting energy is electric. Miss Adelaide (Marisha Wallace) sings to a rapt sea of fans; Nathan Detroit (Daniel Mays, capering like Martin Short’s Ed Grimley) sweet-talks them when his doll gets prickly. Everything—floating craps game, marching missionary parade—must “excuse me, pardon me” its way through the milling traffic. Staging “Guys and Dolls” like a packed revival meeting rhymes with the musical’s own story: the gambler Sky Masterson (Andrew Richardson) will eventually throw in his lot with the missionaries. In this fervent atmosphere, how could he not?
There’s a certain loss, though. To compete with all those bodies moving around, the sound designer, Paul Arditti, has cranked the amplification too high, and Sky and his beloved Sarah (Celinde Schoenmaker) keep pivoting to face a different direction, never locking eyes, let alone hearts. In-the-round staging can be exciting—gladiatorial, even—but it makes it hard to illustrate intimate relationships. The issue of where to look certainly scuppered one of London’s stranger musical efforts: Ashley Robinson’s attempt to turn Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” itself an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story, into a play with countrified music by Dan Gillespie Sells. Watchers sit close enough at the new @sohoplace to smell the beans that Jack (the delicate, nervy Mike Faist) and Ennis (the inward-turning Lucas Hedges) are heating over a real campfire, but the ninety-minute “just the facts, ma’am” version of their painful romance can’t show us what we really want to see: the moment the cowboys’ glances catch.
There’s more heat—though not the erotic kind—between the two men in Jack Thorne’s “The Motive and the Cue,” a quasi-historical portrait of the theatrical giants Richard Burton (Johnny Flynn) and John Gielgud (Mark Gatiss). The setting is the lead-up to a 1964 Broadway production of “Hamlet,” which was directed by Gielgud and starred the thunder-and-lightning Burton as the not so melancholy Dane. Thorne references a book by the actor Richard L. Sterne, who made recordings surreptitiously during rehearsals, but mostly he seems to borrow from William Redfield’s “Letters from an Actor,” an epistolary account of the show’s process. Redfield’s crisp, brilliant, refreshingly irritable narrative is one of the great books on performance. He played Guildenstern, a sly and listening courtier, in that production; something about the part must lend itself to existential observation. (Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” was first performed in 1966.)
Unfortunately, Thorne’s additions to Redfield’s material tend to the maudlin and the tabloid. Burton, known for his drinking, is here a sometimes cruel and sloppy alcoholic. Flynn captures the weird tang of Burton’s Welsh accent, though not his gravitas; and Gatiss plays Gielgud as a figure so desperate for succor that he pays a sex worker to come to his room, where he sobs, chastely, in his arms. The director, Sam Mendes, hopes that lushness will add some dignity to the proceedings, and stages the play like a film. On the wide proscenium of the Lyttleton, black flats whip apart to reveal an all-white rehearsal hall, a ruby-red royal suite, a sapphire-blue hotel room.
Thorne translates some scenes directly from Redfield, bridging them with sequences from “Hamlet.” Shakespeare, I’ll say this for him, wrote some solid stuff. You can hear where Thorne’s own language comes in—in 1964, I don’t think people said “I got you” in the middle of an embrace. He also transforms Gielgud, who seemed so reluctant to make choices that Redfield called him a “fine thoroughbred refusing his jump,” into a wise father figure, full of secret sadness. Thorne has an obsession with father-son dysfunction: he interpolated flashbacks of Scrooge’s nasty pa into his 2017 adaptation of “A Christmas Carol”; and his Tony Award-winning “Harry Potter” play turned the Boy Who Lived into the Dad Who Neglected. Here, he has Burton finally break down while admitting that his father was a drunk and a bully, and Thorne urges us to believe that this connection to biography is a turning point for his performance. The real Burton knew his craft far better. “When I am not still, I am poor,” he told Redfield. The play’s greatest pleasures therefore come from Gatiss, who is still. His delicacy with the text lifts his scenes above the surrounding bathos like a kite. 
London Theatre at a Breakneck Pace
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