Operation Mincemeatis a tale of courage against the odds – and that goes for the hit musical’s poster, too. “It’s a brave producer who will go with just a graphic,” says its designer, Bob King. Luckily Avalon was that producer, “brave enough to go with probably the smallest title treatment in the West End”. Against a sea of jaunty, hazard-warning yellow, the poster features an energetic black scribble in the top right while the title is small and tight in the middle. Look again and you’re staring at a sketch of Hitler’s fringe and moustache. The name of the show is neatly topped by a handle, signalling the stealth attache case that propels the Nazi-duping plot.
A theatreland legend, King has form in creating brands that can travel and endure. Mincemeat is just his latest poster to hit Broadway. He had fun, he admits, with this musical of spies and stratagems, which isup for four Tony awards in June. “We did it in lockdown, and went through lots of scribbles. I’m old school – I always start with scribbling it out in my book, notepad or the back of a fag packet. My designers can make it look fabulous, but unless you’ve got that first idea, the computer won’t solve it for you.”
Mincemeat fell foul of Transport for London’s anti-graffiti caution (although its initial ban was overturned). “They said the hair looked as if it had been put on with a marker – which it had of course!” Same with the apparently scribbled updating of the show’s five-star reviews. TfL’s advertising policy declares that graffiti-styled ads “encourage wider acts of vandalism”. King protests: “You’re sending them a piece of art, and it’s censored. Everything becomes bland. There’s no punch, no guts.”
With his duck-and-dive energy, King has become one of theatre’s defining figures, receiving an Olivier special recognition award in 2022. “I always had an eye,” he admits. A scribbler from childhood, he didn’t enjoy college, so joined a print shop in Covent Garden. Next came a government gig in Woolwich. “Everyone was in a suit and tie and I was wearing dungarees and a perm. I couldn’t stand it, it wasn’t rock’n’roll.”
He ended up at ad agency Dewynters (his interview test was a black and white illustration of Paul Scofield) in the 1980s. “Bonkers times,” he says. “We had a lot of fun.” Anthony Pye-Jeary, the co-founder, was always accompanied by his dog Boston, at least until theatre o’clock. “He’d put Boston in the back of a taxi and send him home.” Robert Dewynter himself, AKA the Major, was old-school louche: “Pinstripe suit. Cigarette holder. Proper eccentric. For his 40th birthday they got an armoured car, like a tank, to turn up in Dover Street and drive him down for lunch at the Savoy.”
King’s indelible images are inextricable from the shows they promote. His career began alongside the mega-musicals that needed a brand to fit globetrotting productions. He and Dewynters’ creative director Russ Eglin created the white carnival mask and red rose that forever herald Phantom of the Opera. “It was pre-computer, so everything was hand-painted. Russ sketched out the mask and I airbrushed it. For the lettering I used Letraset – cut it up like a shattered piece of glass, and then airbrushed it to give the feeling of glass. The technology has developed, but the mask and title remain.”
Daniel Radcliffe escaped the shackles of Harry Potter by appearing in Peter Shaffer’s Equus in 2007: an audacious rebrand enhanced by a nude poster image. “He was up for it, and the shoot was quite something,” says King. “We had this horse in a studio in north London – the trainer just touched his neck and he lay down.” As the Gielgud theatre was being renovated, the resulting image covered the scaffolding: “it looked like we owned the building.”
Some posters trumpet their stars, others bravely withhold them. Imelda Staunton led last year’s Hello, Dolly! but her irrepressible glint was absent from the graphics-only poster. “It always used to be that the show was bigger than the star,” King says. “In latter years, there’s so much riding on a production that producers are nervous. We may start with a logo, a look. But that may well develop when the stars become available – it’s often very last minute.” The first poster for Robert Icke’s much lauded Oedipus didn’t initially show Lesley Manville and Mark Strong; they appeared in later incarnations.
Framed posters surround us in King’s London office, from hits to no-hopers (“Sometimes it’s been a case of: nice poster, shame about the show”). He set up his own company in 2015, and having his name above the door comes with a sense of worth. He’d always planned to retire at 50, but thought, “I don’t want to live my life not knowing what could have been. I started it on a couple of grand, moved in, had one phone line and a mobile.” His company’s first job was a school’s version of School of Rock. “The phone rang in the first half an hour.” Since then, he says, it hasn’t stopped.
“Every job has a problem that needs solving,” he adds, relishing the challenge of adding graphic audacity to theatreland. “You’re creating a tease. I would never try to tell the whole story – the magic has to be on stage.” Selling your audacious idea is another matter. “Blood, sweat and tears have gone into each one of these visuals,” he says. “I keep rejected ones in the drawer, because a good idea is a good idea.”
Operation Mincemeatis at the Fortune theatre, London, and the Golden theatre, New York