7462/20391
Oh man, I’ve been really looking forward to my 20,000th day on the planet earth, slowly counting down towards it. With just 19 days to go according to yesterday’s blog I decided to double check my maths to ensure I didn’t end celebrating on the wrong day. I discovered that today is in fact my 20,391st day on the planet earth. It’s over a year since I should have been having this celebration. I totally missed it. I guess I’ll have to wait for the 30,000th day now. I can hang on another 26 and a half years right? Well I am bloody well going to have to.
What an anticlimax! Or as it should be called, "a middle-aged man’s most energetic climax.”
A rare night out for Cathard (this is my attempt to create a Brangelina type nickname for me and Catie, but just conjures up the image of a feline erection - quite apt) as we drove to London for an early dinner and a show. We were attending the press night of Operation Mincemeat - The Musical, a Fringe success story that has found its way to the West End at the Fortune Theatre. I didn’t know too much about it beforehand and was interested how they would turn the story of MI5 using the dead body of a homeless man to fool Hitler into thinking the Allies were going to attack via Sardinia, not as in fact was the case, Sicily into a musical. But now I do know how they were going to do that. And they did it in a most excellent fashion.
A very hard-working cast of 5 play all the parts (and some of them co-wrote it too) and it’s managed to translate to the big(-gish) stage (The Fortune Theatre is quite compact, but was where Beyond the Fringe was staged in London which I found very exciting), without losing its Fringe feel. There’s some razzmatazz and clever staging and magical costume changes, but it’s still knockabout and a little self-referential, sometimes feeling like West End and sometimes like a (very good) student revue. It pastiches all kinds of musical styles, but in a classy way and is at points remarkably emotive and moving. And it’s gender fluid with female actors playing men and male actors playing women, which helps to illustrate the fact that there is no real difference between the characters, and yet the women are treated very differently to the men. At one point a man who is playing a middle-aged female secretary, in a reasonably broad fashion reduced the audience to tears with a song about losing a love in the First World War and you completely believed in the character.
It sends up sexism and elitism in a fun way, but is also a celebration of the bravery and ingenuity and the humanity of all those involved in the war. But mainly it’s just cracking good fun, with the cast enjoying themselves, despite the gruelling nature of them all being on stage pretty much all the time.
Anyway you should go and see it if you can. Unpretentious and smart and funny. And a man doing a sort of Molly Sugden style character will make you cry,
