‘Navan is where I started and the Solstice will always have a special place in my heart’

Sean Carey is currently treading the boards in the musical comedy Operation Mincemeat, based on the real life events of a World War II British deception operation.

The show produced by British comedy troupe, SpitLip opened in the West End in 2023 and has received six Olivier Award nominations, winning for Best New Musical and Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical.

Sean who plays one of the lead characters in the musical says the plot line is “stranger than fiction!”

“It is a true story from World War II when MI5 tricked the Nazis into diverting 90,000 troops from Sicily to Sardinia,” explains Sean.

“They dressed a dead homeless person up as a pilot and handcuffed a briefcase full of fake documents to his wrist, dumped him off the coast of Spain so the body would wash ashore so the German spies in Spain would find him and think a pilot had crash landed and they had stumbled upon these invasion plans that they were going to invade Sardinia instead of Sicily,” added Sean.

“This actually worked and it is one of the more weirder stories that has come out of World War II.

“It is stranger than fiction. There was so much from the true story that was so mental that they didn’t include it in the musical because they didn’t think people would believe it. “

The Dunshaughlin native plays MI5 agent Charles Cholmondeley in the hit comedy, one of the 60 characters shared amongst the five actors.

“Five of us play 60 different parts so it’s high energy and lots of quick changes and different hats and different voices to create this story,” said Sean.

“My core character is a guy called Charles Cholmondeley, who worked in MI5,” he added.

“Initially he wanted to be a pilot but he was myopic and his eyesight was too bad so he ended up in military deception and Operation Mincemeat was his brainchild and you see the show through his eyes.

“He is quite nervous and quite timid and he meets another man called Ewen Montagu who worked in intelligence who is kind of the showman, has the bravado, he has everything Charles doesn’t have.

“They compliment each other and become a kind of Ying and Yang duo. It’s your standard buddy comedy where these two mismatched people team up.”

As well as the frivolity of it all, the shoe focuses on the hardcore subject of life at war.

“There are darkly funny things that happened that feature in the show but it also has moments of poignancy and respect for the human cost of the war and I think at the heart of the show it is a tribute to the people who didn’t get tributes,” explains Sean.

“Glyndwr Michael, the unfortunate man who lost in life in the operation and is used in the plot gets treated very respectfully. It also becomes a tribute to the women of the war who might not have got the respect or acknowledgement, their contributions wouldn’t have been acknowledged enough.

“So although it’s kind of silly and funny, there are moments that ground it and go, ‘yes this is also a story about war’.”

It was fate that presented Sean with a chance to star in the musical as he explains:

“I’m in the West End version now but this show was developed in small theatres on the London fringe,” said Sean.

“The idea was that they were going to do one last run in 2022 in Hammersmith at Riverside Studios,” he added.

“But 10 days before they opened in Hammersmith Dave Cumming who is one of the writers in the show and is the original Charles fell off his bike cycling to the theatre and broke his collar bone.

“He didn’t have any understudy and because of my background in West End comedies my name came up. I auditioned for it, got the gig and had to learn it in six days and had to operate on pure instinct.”

That instinct was honed during his time in St Mary’s Musical Society in Navan according to the thespian.

“I came up in Navan Musical Society, the same as Killian Donnelly, another successful actor that came out of Navan and a really dear friend of mine,” said Sean.

“We always maintain that it was the am dram that gave us that sense of ‘ah sure it’ll be grand on the night!’ he added.

“There are so many stories from Navan of bits of sets falling and being the one to pick it up, you just have to think on your feet. When you take the pressure off and just getting on with it, it’s mad what you can achieve.”

Sean’s first foray into West End musicals came when he acted as an understudy in ‘The Play That Goes Wrong,’ another brilliant chuckle a minute production.

“I had just seen this play that opened on the West End and I thought that it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen and I thought I have to find a way to get into this show,” remembers the talented actor.

“So I got a job at the theatre ripping the tickets and selling the ice cream and I watched the show every night so I could learn the music,” he added.

“One day a gentleman tried to get out at the interval and I said ‘sorry sir, have you got a ticket to get back in’ and it turned out that he was the director of the show!

“I emailed him about three months later because I heard they were looking for understudies and I explained I was the Irish so-and-so who asked you for your ticket, I’d love to audition for the show and he gave me an audition and I got a job as an understudy there for a year.”

Sean says taking the show to Dublin was a full circle moment.

“We brought the show to Dublin and did a week in the Gaiety and it was just kind of that feeling like I had something to show for the last few years and selling wine over the phone or handing out newspapers outside the Tube station had been worth it.

“For me to get to play this amazing role back home that was a dream come true.”

Sean who has taken on his third comedic role in the West End describes having comedy legend Rowan Atkinson in the audience recently as “surreal.”

“I have always loved to make people laugh and growing up I idolised Jim Carrey and Robin Williams and all of these comedy legends,” added the Dunshaughlin actor.

“I had Mr Bean on video and I wore it out I watched it so much so it amazing when Rowan Atkinson came to one of the shows, he was in the centre of the stall so I just had to not look.”

Performing allowed a young Sean to put his energy into something he was passionate about as he explains:

“I think I was a very hyper child and probably always wanted to be the centre of attention and I think my mam was trying to find a way to harness that energy,” he said.

“I did the school plays initially. I went to Dunshaughlin Community School where Johnny Grant directed the school plays and Blathin Fitzgerald taught drama and Johnny gave me my first big part as Joxer Daly in Juno and the Paycock in 2004,” added Sean.

“The year I was doing my Junior Cert, Johnny said can you sing because they are doing Westside Story in Navan and they need lads, so I auditioned and got in and the guy playing the lead of Tony was Killian Donnelly and that kind of threw me into this world.”

Sean praised the two mentors who encouraged his love for the arts.

“So many schools put so much emphasis on sports but Johnny and Blathin were brilliant for flying the flag for drama, I do feel like arts can be neglected sometimes and I think it is so important because for me who couldn’t catch a cold to have something else as an outlet was amazing.

“Navan is where I started and the Solstice will always have a special place in my heart.”

Life in showbusiness is not for the faint hearted and those who choose to follow a path similar to Sean’s need to be prepared for all that comes with it as he explains:

“I think you have to be fearless, I think you have to be prepared for adversity. You have to be in it for the right reasons, you have to love acting.

“The minute I stopped trying to get jobs and trying to get into the West End and asked myself how do I get better at acting, my career just sky rocketed. Keep learning, ask questions, go to classes.

“It’s not about the Instagram followers, it is about the art itself.”

Although the comedic actor performs to hundreds of people each night in one of the most celebrated theatrical districts in the world, he has no ambition to court fame.

“What I love the most is that I can pay the bills and have a normal life doing what I love,” said Sean.

“The best thing about theatre is that you have the anonymity as well as the fun part,” he added.

“I’m very lucky that we have loads of fans of the show, you get little presents at the stage door and all of that and they are such lovely people but I feel like that could be very overwhelming if that was your life all the time.

“But I get the best of both worlds doing it this way.”

Operation Mincemeat is currently running in the Fortune Theatre in the heart of London’s West End theatre district. For further information see operationmincemeat.com.