Mincemeat
‘You know that feeling when you wake up and you don’t know where you are, you don’t know what you’ve done, you’re not sure if you might have committed some awful crime… and sometimes it stays with you all morning…’
First aired in June 2001, MINCEMEAT features testimony, speculation and outright lies: don't miss the shocking truth behind an event that changed history.
MINCEMEAT is a narrative that crosses time and territory to find answers to questions of identity and matters of life and death.
Cardboard Citizens takes over a Shoreditch warehouse for this production, unravelling the truths and the untruths surrounding a World War Two intelligence operation.
KIDNAP! In 2009, a group of squatters kidnap a judge and put him on trial for a sixty-six year-old crime.
SUICIDE! In 1909, a young and lice-ridden Adolf Hitler washes up in a homeless shelter in Vienna; forty-six years later he will commit suicide.
MURDER? In 1943, the body of a military man is washed up on a Spanish beach, helping prevent the death of thousands. An accidental hero - or a man who never was?
Conspiracy theory meets chaos theory, tongue never a million miles from cheek.
This is Cardboard Citizens.
"I was utterly gripped by this marvellous production" (Michael Billington, The Guardian ****)
A trailer for the production can be found here: http://cardboardcitizens.org.uk/index.php?pid=2&subid=9#video
Reviews
Mincemeat
Michael Billington
The Guardian, Friday 19 June 2009
Some evenings are a nightmare. I was late arriving at this Shoreditch arts centre. My car had vanished when I came out. I was even accosted by a stranger during this promenade production, who mistakenly claimed he had been in a play of mine in Canonbury. But that was oddly appropriate since this extraordinary Cardboard Citizens show by Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh revolves around questions of identity and, whatever my private hassles, I was utterly gripped by this marvellous production.
Its ultimate source is The Man Who Never Was, a book by Ewen Montagu subsequently turned into a film. It concerns a wartime operation in which the body of a fictive Major Martin was dropped off the Spanish coast with a briefcase containing secret documents about allied plans to launch an attack via Sardinia. The whole scheme was, of course, a ruse to divert German troops. But Montagu never revealed the identity of the chosen corpse and, as the play makes clear, it was only in 1997 that it became known that the corpse was that of an illegitimate Welsh vagrant who kipped on the streets round St Pancras.
From these stark facts the Cardboard Citzens team have woven a fascinating play: one that takes the form of a quest as the supposed "Major Martin", arriving in an anteroom to heaven, returns to earth in search of his true identity.
In part, the play is a polemic about the way the officer-class regards the homeless as disposable property: the 1943 operation may have saved thousands of lives, but we are forcefully reminded by its hapless victim that in 50 or 100 years' time there will still be people whose lives are expendable.
But the play also takes on the dimensions of a dream about the fluctuating nature of identity. As the audience follows the action, from wartime committee rooms to a mortuary and a shelter for the homeless, it becomes clear that nothing and nobody is ever quite what they seem. In its references to Shakespeare, Hitler and Chaplin, the work is nothing if not ambitious, but it ends resoundingly with a speech from The Great Dictator claiming "the way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way".
Jackson's humanist production successfully binds all these elements together, and contains sterling performances from Ifan Meredith as the questing hero, Robert Gillespie as his Chaplinesque guide, and Nicholas Khan as the plotting Montagu. But its chief aim is to remind us of the people's war, and to demonstrate the perennial danger of treating the lost and homeless simply as so much mincemeat.
Mincemeat, by Cardboard Citizens at Cordy House
Rating * * * * *
By Charles Spencer
Occasionally you turn up at a show with meagre expectations only to discover that you have stumbled across theatrical treasure. Such is the case with Mincemeat, staged in a sinister, semi-derelict building in hip Hoxton by Cardboard Citizens, the theatre company that works with homeless people.
At first, we seem to be in for a ghastly piece of agit-prop as a van roars into the building full of angry activists wearing animal masks. They pull a coffin out of the back and reveal an old man who is tied up and submitted to hostile questioning about his role in the Second World War's Operation Mincemeat. It turns out that he is Ewen Montagu, a Royal Navy intelligence officer, who masterminded the famous deception in which the body of a dead marine was deliberately washed up on a beach in Spain in 1943, manacled to a briefcase containing top-secret documents suggesting that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, rather than their intended target, Sicily.
The Germans swallowed the fake plans hook line and sinker, diverting troops and allowing the Allied invasion of Sicily to go ahead more smoothly, and with much less loss of life, than would have otherwise been the case.
The idea that this brave and ingenious real-life plan was going to be mocked by a right-on theatre company made me foam with fury, but the opening is a trick, and the play turns out to be much more subtle and haunting. As we are led through a succession of derelict rooms, conjuring such locations as a mortuary, a bomb site and an air-raid shelter, Mincemeat becomes a moving account of lost identity.
Who exactly was Major William Martin of the Royal Marines whose body was found on the Spanish Beach? Did he exist, or was he merely an ingenious fabrication. I don't want to give too much away, and there are in any case conflicting theories. But the piece develops with great ingenuity, and in one of the finest scenes becomes a homage to that great wartime movie A Matter of Life and Death. The final scene is more moving still as we crowd into a fetid night shelter and the story's relevance to the Cardboard Citizens company becomes clear.
Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheik have devised a fluid. imaginative script, which Jackson directs with great panache. Ifan Meredith as the confused major and Robert Gillespie as his guide in the afterlife are especially good in a strong ensemble.
Mincemeat
Susannah Clapp The Observer, Sunday 28 June 2009
For its marvellous new production, Cardboard Citizens, the theatre company which works with homeless people, has squatted in Cordy House, Shoreditch. It has filled rough concrete rooms with spooks, rumours, red herrings and discoveries. Mincemeat is a wartime thriller, a terrific unravelling of history. It investigates a mystery: the identity of the body dumped off the Spanish coast by the Allies in 1943 in a (successful) effort to persuade the Germans that the landing in Europe would take place through Sardinia, not Sicily. Writers Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh have made of this something intricately layered, which suggests how people decide who they are, and shows what it is to have neither home, nor name.
Jackson's production makes the audience feel what that's like as, with identity cards round their necks, they are moved from one unwelcoming space to another. From a bombsite, where amid the rubble of what was a hostel, a man picks up the poison that's been put down for rats. To the St Pancras mortuary, where two men are dressing a body in someone else's clothes, while the undertaker unfreezes the corpse's feet with an electric fire. To a bomb shelter, where spectators perch on mattresses and bunk beds while portions of The Great Dictator flicker on a wall of corrugated iron. And to a low-ceilinged room where a fake biography, which includes a fiancee with strangled upper-class vowels, is being constructed. At the beginning and end, the outside world is suddenly revealed: as if to say, this is still happening today.
Mincemeat
The Sunday Times, Sunday 28 June 2009
****
We like our war stories starchy, but Mincemeat tells a messy tale. A corpse washed up on the Spanish coast in 1943 delighted the Germands: a British major with secret plans for an attack on Sardina. The plans were fake - a decoy for the real target, Sicily - as was the major. The body was that of a homeless Welshman who died of pneumonia, posthumously reconditioned and dropped at sea.
Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company that works with the homeless, revives this 2001 show in an abandonded Shoreditch warehouse. The authors, Adrian Jackson, Farhana Sheikh, use Operation Mincemeat, as the cunning plan was known, to prompt an initially tricksy but ultimately wrenching inquiry into the way idenity can be stripped away.
We troop through the dilapidated building, following "Major Martin" (Ifan Meredith) as he excavates his story. As in the classic war film A Matter of Life and Death, we enter a bureaucratic afterlife, full of clacking typewriters, filing cabinets and harassed translators interrogating new arrivals. Yet this amnesiac hero is no dashing pilot but a lost soul, unravelling his fabricated persona.
The military concocts a letter from his sweetheart ("Why did we go and meet in the middle of a war?") and costumes the corpse in a St Pancras mortuary. Undoing the slow-dawning imposture takes an age, but the second half is superb - two scenes in which Martin wanders into a smoky bomb site and a homeless shelter. By now he knows he was "mad Taff", a grief-addled rantipole wandering the streets and his story prompts agonising notes of loss and fear from the sheltering Londoners.
Performances are variable, but the production's fervour and imagination are seering. Scrabbling through conventional heroism, Mincemeat insists on the dignity of the dispossessed.
Mincemeat
* * * * *
Rarely does a show leave one genuinely speechless, but Mincemeat, Cardboard Citizens’ promenade production at Cordy House, does just that. Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh’s play, set variously in 1909, 1943 and 2009, is a brilliant exposure of attitudes towards the most vulnerable members of our society, the deceit contained within myths of war and the slippery nature of memory.
In 1943 the body of a British soldier washes up on a beach in Spain. The documents in the briefcase found alongside it are intended to confuse the Germans as to the plans of the Allied powers. The Germans’ subsequent decision to divert troops away from Sicily to Sardinia was a major turning point in the war. It was said at the time that the military man whose body was put to such heroic use was a Major William Martin; this turned out to be merely a smokescreen however, and the true identity of the man remained secret until 1997. Mincemeat thrillingly unravels this mystery.
Cordy House is a disused building that provides a hugely atmospheric context for the promenade performance. Mamoru Iriguchi’s design works effectively with the space, creating among other setting a 1940s mortuary, a Blitz-era air raid shelter and a bombed out homeless hostel, all of them completely convincing. We are led from room to room, through smoke-filled hallways or down hidden staircases. It is testament to the skill of the company that we become entirely disorientated during this process, forgetful of the nature of any reality other than that which we are being invited to view. The experience is so evocative it is disconcerting, particularly in the final scene in the shelter where actors and audience sit together on dirty bunkbeds, clothing dangling from lines strung between the filthy walls.
A true ensemble production, the cast of Mincemeat is without a weak link. Ifan Meredith as Major Martin and Robert Gillespie as Charlie lead the plot with assured performances, their fellow cast members taking on a wide variety of roles to complete the dramatic picture. The frequently unusual casting decisions reveal the cast’s impressive adaptability. Jakob B. Goode’s Agnes is a sweet and funny portrait and deserves particular mention.
There are flaws in this production: moments of high emotion are handled with less subtlety than they deserve (a criticism to be laid at the door of director Adrian Jackson rather than any individual performer) and the final scenes might carry a greater power if they didn’t follow the jolt back to reality that the interval creates. That said however, this is an extraordinary show which is ambitious in its scope: Jackson and Sheikh’s script includes references to Shakespeare, war poetry and Charlie Chaplin films, and addresses not just issues of prejudice and historical truth, but also the role of theatrical representation itself in analysing the past and the parts we play in it.
Cardboard Citizens is a charity for homeless and displaced people as well as a professional theatre company and it's inspiring to witness the effectiveness with which they combine extremely high quality, powerful dramatic work with a far-reaching social vision. This is a show that everyone should see.
Jo Caird.
Further information can be found here: http://cardboardcitizens.org.uk/index.php?pid=2&subid=9