Gender in Operation Mincemeat

Ah, time for another ramble about gender and queerness in a show that’s not about queerness and only kind of about gender.

To begin: I enjoyed Operation Mincemeat. I love a show that is very tight, and this show is extremely tight. I liked how despite having a cast of 5, the stage almost always had 4 or more people. I loved the constant character changes and almost magical way the cast distributed costumes for quick changes, and I really liked the staging (although with 8 different phones on set, I’d hoped for a little bit more phone-based humor). There was plenty I didn’t enjoy, which we discussed in class, such as the musical stylings, the choice to only have one ballad, the surprisingly small number of jokes for a comedy, the complete lack of vulnerability for most characters, etc.

Now, the show does something interesting with gender. With so few performers, and so many characters, every cast member plays a character of a different gender at some point in the production. However, of the main roles, the ones each cast member plays most frequently, we have 3 men (Charles, Montagu, Colonel Bevan) and two women (Hester, Jean), and a cast of three women and two men, though despite having more women actors than women characters, one of the main women characters, Hester, is played by one of the two men. This gender-swapped casting is held across the doubles for the cast, and the original cast – Montagu, Jean, and Bevan are always women, and Hester and Charles are always men. So, obviously, this casting is very purposeful. To have half of your main female characters played by men, in a cast that’s already majority female? Of course it’s purposeful.

So, why does this show do that? Is it successful? Is it insensitive? Ultimately, I think it was successful, and I was for the most part really impressed with how inoffensively it handled the topic, though I am a little conflicted with some early moments. I want to acknowledge that Britain has a huge problem with gender and transphobia, especially things deemed “classically British” (which this musical definitely is) which is why I’m writing this at all. If I saw an improv or comedy show in the states where players were gender-swapped, I wouldn’t think much of it at all – but something very British that’s very popular? That’s more interesting.

What is all the gender-swapping doing in this play? Well, we’ve established it’s necessary because of the limited cast and huge array of roles. But why the swapping in the main cast? Why not have a man play Montagu or Bevan, and a woman play Hester? I think the intention is to draw attention to the gender disparities of the time, and show their absurdity/inaccuracy. Showing some male characters with female actors and female characters with male actors talking about the roles of women and the roles of men gives a natural undermining of that concept just by the staging. Obviously there’s no merit to this system, because look! Those “roles” are literally being played interchangeably by men and women right now! And I think in this regard, it’s very successful. It’s able to draw attention to those womens’ stories and protest their past treatment without having to be too explicit in the show, and it’s very effectively feminist because of this! It also doesn’t have to take time to overstress its points as the casting does so quite naturally. It’s honestly a really clever way to tell this story about gender in that time period.

What’s the worry with Britain’s classic transphobia? I want to make clear, gender-swapped casting does not necessarily have anything to say about queerness or transgender people. When Judi Dench plays Hamlet, I’m not thinking about queerness, nor am I if I’m seeing a male Shite as a woman in Noh theater. However, contemporary media often makes the crossdressing actor (almost always male) the butt of jokes that hurt actual queer people. For instance, jokes which acknowledge this cross dressing in ways that only say “oh yeah, there’s a DUDE in that dress” are harmful – their only purpose is to suggest a comedy in a man wearing a dress, even when, within this play, this character is fully a woman and treated as such. They suggest an immutability of sex that even the play can’t overturn, and even trying is comical. These jokes naturally bring trans people to mind, as the punchline of “it is funny that this woman ‘is really’ a man in a dress” is a transphobic concept, as is the concept of an immutability of sex that forever limits access to another gender.

Besides communicating to an audience that if they see “a man in a dress” that it’s appropriate to laugh, or that that person is “really a man”, these jokes are also especially harmful to trans people who are still in the closet, as it dissuades them from ever expressing themselves, dismissing it as inherently comedic and impossible. It’s also, of course, harmful to trans people. Sometimes I’ll catch a glance of myself in a mirror and think “oh, that looks a little like a man in a dress” and if “a man in a dress” is inherently comedic, bringing to mind the (false) juxtaposition of an immutable sex with an impossible gender, then I just feel like shit.

So does Operation Mincemeat avoid this kind of humor? Almost entirely, and I’m torn on if the times it doesn’t end up helping its point. There are two main instances where this type of humor appears: First, in the song “All the Ladies”, the actor for Charles plays a woman character who is very feminine and very over-the-top in her motions, and the fact that Charles’ actor is playing this character is played for a laugh. (I personally hate this joke. I’m very feminine and extremely over the top! Why would a Y chromosome make me any less entitled to this behavior?) Second, there are some early jokes about Hester being unattractive or undesirable that could be based on her character’s age, but generate a laugh that seems to come from the fact that the actor is male. There are no jokes, notably, about any of the female-to-male cross casting.

I wonder if the over the top behavior in “All the Ladies” actually serves to contrast with what the cast is actually doing. Hester, notably, isn’t a part of that number, but does interact with the players in that number before and after it is performed. This could be interpreted as the company saying “Look, here’s some cross-dressing played for laughs. This isn’t what we’re doing with Hester.” While I don’t think this is the kindest thing to do, I wonder if their cross-casting with Hester played worse with the audience without this scene. As if this scene were to say “Look, you can laugh. We will challenge your perspectives next, but laugh now so you know when you shouldn’t.” The Hester jokes about her unattractiveness are, however, confusing to me, as they seem to contradict this. Is their purpose solely to establish her age? Surely there were better ways to do this.

So, ultimately, I’m a little torn on how Operation Mincemeat executes its’ cross-gender casting. I really like what they seem to be doing with the cross-casting, using it to silently but highly effectively undermine the patriarchal ideals of the time. However, I’m torn on the less sensitive handling in “All the Ladies”. Was this a necessary evil to get the audience to understand the company’s goals? And did it only stick out to me due to my personal dislike of it? Or, was this a spot where the company missed the mark, and couldn’t resist the urge to partake in this common and harmful trope?