Student Life
‘Comedy is very deceptive’: Seán Carey on ‘Operation Mincemeat’
As a history student, you occasionally come across stories so strange they feel almost fictional. Operation Mincemeat is one of them. In 1943, British intelligence attempted to deceive Nazi Germany about the Allied invasion of southern Europe by planting false documents on a corpse dressed as a Royal Marine officer, letting the body wash ashore in Spain, and hoping the Germans would take the bait. Against all reasonable expectations, the plan worked. 80 years later, the story has found a second life on stage – though perhaps not in a form its architects might have anticipated. The musical Operation Mincemeat, currently touring the UK, turns the entire plan into what actor Seán Carey cheerfully describes as “a five-hander gender swap show about tricking the Nazis with a dead body”.
Carey plays Charles Cholmondeley, the MI5 officer who helped devise the plan. Like the rest of the cast, however, he spends much of the show darting between a multitude of other roles, switching accents, costumes, and personalities in seconds. Just five actors play a total of characters that lingers somewhere around the 85 count, turning one of Britain’s most elaborate deception operations into something resembling theatrical controlled chaos. Yet, behind the rapid-fire comedy lies a story rooted firmly in the lives of real people. When I ask whether playing a historical figure carries a particular sense of responsibility, his answer is immediate: “Yes, 100%. 100%.”
When Carey met members of the Cholmondeley family, seeing the premise of the show written down initially made them wary. “They were quite kind of nervous to see it”, Carey explains. “When they see on paper, oh, it’s a comedy about this kind of subject, there’s this worry that there might be maybe a mean-spiritedness.” What reassured them, Carey thinks, was the show’s tone. Operation Mincemeat embraces the absurdity of its story, but never entirely forgets the human reality behind it. “The beautiful thing about this show is that it’s very, very funny and very, very silly”, he says, “but it also treats the subject matter with a lot of respect”.
In some ways, the real operation already contains the strange mixture of humour and darkness that the musical leans to. For Carey, the sheer implausibility of the story is what makes it theatrically irresistible. “It was a really crazy plan”, he says. “It’s so much stranger than fiction that there are elements that were really, really funny and really silly and really macabre.” In fact, some of the most extraordinary details never even made it into the show. When researching the operation, Carey discovered that an American pilot who crash-landed around the time the body was discovered (the subject of the song ‘The Ballad of Willie Watkins’ in the musical) was actually asked to attend the autopsy and identify the corpse. Moments like that, he explains, were omitted simply because they were so outrageous audiences might not believe them. The real story, it seems, stretched credibility ever further than musical theatre.
Researching Cholmondeley himself, however, proved more difficult than researching the operation as a whole. “It’s very hard to research someone who was part of MI5”, Carey explains. “There’s very little about him.” Intelligence officers do not tend to leave extensive personal archives and as such, much of Cholmondeley’s life remains frustratingly obscure. One fragment, shared by his daughter, has stayed with Carey in particular: “One of the kind of lovelier things that his daughter shared with me is that he loved Tom and Jerry.”
It is an oddly fitting fact for a show that, as Carey admits, occasionally veers into something resembling cartoonishness. Carey describes the structure of the show as a kind of narrative misdirection – not unlike the deception operation itself. “You might think it’s this screwball kind of madcap comedy”, he says, “and then before you know it you find yourself crying at certain moments”. The emotional pivot works precisely because the humour lowers the audience’s guard. “Comedy is very deceptive”, Carey reflects. “It can catch you off guard, and once your guard is down it can really get through to you in a way that other mediums can’t.”
The story itself lends weight to that shift in tone. Operation Mincemeat was not simply the work of a few brilliant intelligence officers; it relied on an entire network of people across wartime Britain and the musical makes a point of acknowledging that diversity. There were, as Carey puts it, “these Etonian kind of well-to-do people who worked at MI5” – the archetypal figures of Britain’s wartime establishment. A figure that Cholmondeley himself was, as an ex-Oxford student. But there were also “people who worked in the typing pool”, clerks and administrators whose contributions were just as essential to the operation’s success.
And then there was Glyndwr Michael, the homeless Welshman whose body became the fictional ‘Major William Martin’. In life, Michael had struggled with poverty and ill health; in death, he became the unwitting centrepiece of one of the war’s most audacious deceptions. “He had a really difficult life and died in poverty”, Carey says, “but in his death, [he] saved hundreds of thousands of lives and this show acknowledges that in a way that maybe you wouldn’t be able to do in two hours in any other kind of medium”. It is one of the show’s most sobering truths – that the success of the operation depended on someone whose life had been largely invisible.
Perhaps because of this, Carey sees the story as more than a simple eccentric wartime anecdote. Its appeal lies partly in what it says about cooperation. “We live in a very kind of crazy time and very polarised time where people live in various echo chambers and kind of are afraid of each other”, he tells me. Against that backdrop, Operation Mincemeat becomes a reminder that complex problems rarely have simple solutions. “Human beings are messy”, he says. “We’re messy, we’re complicated… we’re born into things that we didn’t ask for. This is about people from every background coming together and doing something incredible. I think that’s something really special and something really necessary for now.”
If the themes of the show are unexpectedly serious, the experience of performing it seems anything but. In moving from off-West End, to the West End, to Broadway, and now a global tour, Operation Mincemeat has attracted an enthusiastic community of fans, affectionately known as ‘Mincefluencers’, who know every lyric and casting combination. On tour, however, many audience members arrive with no idea what they are about to see. “You can almost feel the audience kind of going, ‘What is this?’.”
Part of the fun lies in watching that confusion gradually turn into delight. The premise alone – a musical about wartime espionage performed by five actors playing dozens of roles – can take a little adjustment. But there is always a moment, Carey says, when the audience suddenly falls in love with it. “Pretty much everyone falls in love with it by the end, but it’s hearing when they fall in love with it, and they fall in love with it at different points.” For him, the turning point often arrives during a scene the cast knows as ‘the Pitch’, when Cholmondeley and his colleagues first present their elaborate deception plan. “I feel that’s where people get me as a character fully”, Carey explains. “Once that kind of happens, you’re like, okay, we’re off to the races now.”
What becomes clear over the course of our conversation is how much Carey enjoys being part of it all. Several members of the touring cast began their journey with Operation Mincemeat as understudies before stepping into the principal roles together, creating a company that feels remarkably close-knit. “I can go to work, and I just play with my mates”, Carey says simply. “And I make people laugh for a living.”
He recalls standing on stage during one of the tour’s early performances when the thought struck him mid-scene: how improbable the whole thing was. After years of working on the show in various forms – from understudy roles to the West End and now the national tour – there he was, performing one of the strangest stories alongside a group of close friends. In that moment, he says, he felt “this immense sense of gratitude” that something so unusual had become his everyday work. “My nine to five”, he reflects, still sounding fairly amused by it, “is just being dumb with my mates. It’s great. It’s so much fun”.
In some ways, that sense of unlikely collaboration mirrors the story at the heart of Operation Mincemeat itself. What began as an improbable wartime plan – devised by a handful of people with an audacious idea – has become a piece of theatre that continues to find new audiences. The musical thrives on the same mixture of ingenuity, eccentricity, and collective effort that defined the original operation. Perhaps that is why it works so well: beneath the jokes, quick changes, and absurd premise lies a reminder that history’s most extraordinary moments are often the result of ordinary people working together to attempt something that seems impossible.
Operation Mincemeat is running from the 31st March to 4th April 2026 at New Theatre.
CW: Sexual violence, assault, rape.
The prominent Oxford academic and Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has been sentenced by a Paris criminal court to an 18-year jail term for rape offences committed between 2009 and 2016. Ramadan was convicted of the rape of three women, two years after he was imprisoned for a separate rape offence in Switzerland.
Ramadan was employed by the University of Oxford as Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at St Antony’s College. During his tenure, in October 2017, he was accused by two women of rape, sexual assault, violence, and harassment at the height of the Me Too movement. Ramadan continued to teach until November, when he took an agreed leave of absence from Oxford. At the time, the University said that the leave “allows Professor Ramadan to address the extremely serious allegations made against him”, but “implies no presumption or acceptance of guilt”.
In January 2018, he was detained by French police and taken into custody, where he was formally charged with two counts of rape. Following this, further accusations against him emerged, with more women coming forward with claims that he had made unwanted sexual advances towards them, including allegations of violence and psychological abuse.
As a result, he was formally charged in 2020 with the rape of two more women in France and faced a further charge of rape in Switzerland. Ramadan has consistently denied the charges against him, claiming that they are politically motivated as part of a smear campaign.
Ramadan officially left his position at the University of Oxford in 2021. A spokesperson for the University told Cherwell: “Professor Ramadan left the employment of the University of Oxford in June 2021 by mutual agreement on the basis of early retirement on grounds of ill-health.”
In 2023, Yann Le Mercier was convicted of cyberharassing Ramadan and another individual because of the ongoing court proceedings. At the time, he received the heaviest prison sentence for a cyberbullying case. Ramadan currently has 2.4 million followers on Facebook.
Ramadan was tried by a Swiss appeals court in 2024 over an incident in Geneva in 2008. He was convicted of rape and sexual coercion and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, overturning a previous acquittal. His subsequent appeal against the sentence was rejected.
Ramadan failed to appear in court in Paris this month. His lawyers attributed his absence to his hospitalisation in Switzerland on account of multiple sclerosis, “violating a conditional release order that required him to remain in France”, as Le Monde reports. Prior to the trial, however, a court-ordered medical assessment had confirmed his fitness to plead.
He was convicted in absentia for the rape of three women and sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment. Following the verdict, the court issued an arrest warrant and imposed a permanent ban from French territory, coming into effect upon completion of the sentence. The judgment is not final and is expected to be appealed.
This case comes amid broader concerns about the University of Oxford’s handling of sexual misconduct and assault allegations. These concerns have been further intensified by controversy surrounding another professor who was not suspended despite facing allegations of rape.
St Anne’s College has recently launched the Jane Schulz-Hood Travel and Research Scholarship Fund in memory of alumna Jane E. Hood. The initiative will provide travel and research grants to support students undertaking field work for projects that advance understanding of ecology, the environment, society, global health, and equity issues.
By providing financial assistance for research and travel, it intends to support students to meaningfully contribute to fields that were important to Jane, where they might otherwise be limited by financial barriers. According to St Anne’s, the fund aligns with its mission to help students “understand the world and change it for the better”.
Established by Jane’s family, the scholarship honours both her achievements and her commitment to education. After graduating from Oxford with a BA in Geography, she built a distinguished career as a lawyer in London. Jane passed away in September 2019 at the age of 49, after a battle with cancer.
Her husband Christian said: “For her, education was always a top priority. This included learning as much as possible about other cultures.
“Not surprisingly, Jane loved travelling. She was always very respectful towards others and cherished being in nature. She therefore was interested in the environment and supported initiatives that look after wildlife, water and education.”
Christian added: “Through this fund, we hope that, by providing financial support for research and travel, students at St Anne’s will be able to explore areas that were important to Jane. This will be a wonderful opportunity to give back and to have a legacy for Jane.
St Anne’s told Cherwell that the College “expects to award the grants annually, with the intention that they’ll begin being offered as soon as the fund is fully established”, within the 2026-27 academic year.
“We are thrilled that this Scholarship Fund will become a living legacy for Jane’s generosity of spirit, love of education and deep respect for people and the planet. We look forward to seeing the impact it will have on the next generation of St Anne’s students.”
During my first week in Oxford, I stumbled upon a Scottish third year in the college bar. This was startling; I’d only come across one or two students from north of Newcastle so far, and none of them any older or wiser than I was. I quickly took advantage of the opportunity to ask what societies I should join at the Freshers’ fair the following day.
“Anything but CalSoc”, he said, referring to Oxford’s Caledonian Society. “They’re not actually Scottish. Closest they get is owning an estate up there.”
This was a sweeping and, I thought, probably inaccurate claim, but in those first few days—homesick, lonely, having my own accent parroted back at me during pre-drinks – I didn’t struggle to believe it. While I’d hoped vaguely that I might eventually be proven wrong, I found very little evidence to the contrary. Those I met who were eager for a ticket might not have been royalty, but they were invariably English, and drawn to the ball’s structure and glamour. Tickets were pricey, and seemed to come on the condition of technical ‘training sessions’. The society’s website provided a list of dances to be learned; I only recognised two. One night in Hilary, I saw a throng of kilts and tartan sashes clustered outside the Town Hall, but as I passed, I heard only the same clipped Southern accents I’d become used to in tutorials. I started to hate-watch the dance videos on their Instagram. All of this cemented in me a vehement – and, I always felt, slightly unfair – distaste for CalSoc. What was ostensibly a familiar cultural practice seemed to me somehow violated, alien. I felt worlds away from the dances of my teenage years, where I would often wake up with mysterious injuries from an over-violent Strip the Willow. Why was something ostensibly so familiar, so ‘Scottish’, so unrecognisable?
I was interested to read Nancy Robson’s recent article on reeling practice for the CalSoc ball – a fresh perspective on what has always been, for me, a very one-sided debate. Yet I was also somewhat disconcerted. The picture that emerged was of a strange fusion between English courtly balls à la Bridgerton and some kind of vaguely Scottish aesthetic (Robson makes a passing reference to ‘Braveheart’; the CalSoc website, more egregiously, to ‘ancient druidic roots’). This is a difficult one to square. The histories of ‘ceilidh’ and ‘reeling’ are intertwined, and equally culturally suspect. In his thoughtful essay on the subject, Greg Ritchie notes that both are the result of a 19th century ‘rediscovery’—and appropriation—of Highland culture, differing only in the use they make of a ‘Scottish identity’.
But this difference is still important. Caledonian Societies remain the preserve of the South, and of the Scottish elite, while ceilidh dancing is, for better or worse, part of Scotland’s shared social history. It’s taught in every school, and is the central feature of most weddings. I used to organise ceilidhs as community fundraisers. Reeling may not entirely pretend to be a ceilidh, but it does not exist in some kind of cultural vacuum. When we dress up in tartan, and (in the words of the CalSoc website), ‘party as only the Scottish can’, what kind of mythology are we appealing to? Why is CalSoc so English?
The answer comes in part from its connection to the glamorous ‘reeling circuit’: mainly based in London, this is a season of black and white-tie balls held in royal venues and private member’s clubs. But it’s also to do with the way Scottishness features in the English cultural imagination. As Robson’s article demonstrates, the practices are easily tangled up – and in England, ceilidh rarely comes out on top. She contrasts the formality of CalSoc rehearsals with her previous experience of ceilidh: in a stuffy basement, she found that ceilidh meant ‘descending into a hellish, slightly pagan underworld’. Here, as in reeling societies across the country, ceilidh and reeling are set up as sibling practices – equal in their Scottishness, diverging only in the etiquette they demand. But reeling tends to feel rather out of step with modern-day Scotland. It’s telling, perhaps, that it remains the preserve of lairds and Londoners; yet more telling is its insistence on propriety. The CalSoc website is strict on both dress (‘shorter dresses, jumpsuits, and skirts are not acceptable’) and training (mathematical dance diagrams are provided).While claiming to bring ‘Scotland to the South’, this codification of reeling misses what makes ceilidh so appealing – its inclusivity. CalSoc co-opts, only to gatekeep.
You absolutely should feel like you’re descending into the pits of hell. It will be very sweaty and you will probably be knocked over. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the steps: someone else will lead the way. Ideally you should wake up with bruises. You don’t have to be dressed up, you don’t have to be drunk, and you absolutely do not have to be Scottish. What’s important is that it’s an inclusive and open practice. Ceilidhs have featured in my life since childhood, and still the moment I’ve felt closest to the tradition was in fact in Oxford. My friends and I held an impromptu ceilidh in our living room: there was absolutely no space and no one knew what they were doing. Yet the genuine attempt to engage, the joy and lack of pomp (and black tie) was what made it so special. I don’t disagree with the enthusiasm the CalSoc committee seem to demonstrate; ceilidh dancing is a wonderful practice which can absolutely improve your life. But you don’t need a dance card, training sessions, or an £80 ticket to do so.
EU ministers arrive in Ukraine to mark Bucha massacre anniversary – Europe live | Ukraine
COHO names Jon Hurley Chief Product Officer as rollout
UK aviation regulator rejects Heathrow’s plans to significantly raise landing fees | Heathrow airport
-
Crime & Safety2 weeks agoOxford: ‘Next generation’ LimeBikes in city from today
-
Jobs & Careers2 weeks agoWhy Join Oxford | Oxford University Jobs
-
Jobs & Careers2 weeks agoExplore our Careers
-
Student Life2 weeks agoThe independent cinema battling Oriel College to stay open
-
Oxford Events2 weeks agoMichelin Guide Oxfordshire Restaurants – The Oxford Magazine
-
Oxford Events2 weeks agoOxford News and Events, What’s on in Oxford, Exhibitions
-
Jobs & Careers2 weeks agoInternal Job Board for University vacancies
-
Crime & Safety2 weeks agoCrash partially blocks A40 and causes severe Oxfordshire traffic