LONDON CALLING

"Operation Mincemeat," "Guys and Dolls," and "The Motive and the Cue."

- HELEN SHAW

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.