Arts & Culture
Originally published on Tuesday, 16th June 2009
Cardboard Citizens presents Mincemeat
Founded in 1991 by Artistic Director Adrian Jackson, Cardboard Citizens is the UK’s only homeless people’s professional theatre company. Mincemeat is the first in a three year cycle of plays about forgotten histories, all based on real events in which an ordinary person has affected a bigger sweep of history. It’s a site-specific promenade performance through a re-imagined wartime London, the story of a nobody who became a somebody.
In 1943 the Allied powers secretly planned to make landfall in Europe via Sicily. To deceive the Germans, British Intelligence devised an astonishing and macabre plan they called Operation Mincemeat, designed to convince the Germans that the invasion would come through Sardinia by dropping the body of a Major William Martin off the coast of Spain.
A narrative that crosses time and territory to find answers to questions of identity and matters of life and death, Cardboard Citizens takes over Shoreditch warehouse for this production, unraveling the truths and the untruths surrounding a WWII intelligence operation.
First performed in 2001, Mincemeat features testimony, speculation and outright lies: don’t miss the shocking truth behind an event that changed history.
“A remarkable piece of theatre: multilayered, passionate… makes you angry and makes you cry” Guardian ****
Cardboard Citizens presents Mincemeat
Cordy House, 87-95 Curtain Road, EC2A 3AA
15 June - 12 July • £20-£10 • 020 7478 0100
