Making his Broadway debut at long last ... Ernest Hemingway. Photograph: Corbis
You have to admire the courage and chutzpah with which Ernest Hemingway threw himself into the Spanish civil war. In the autumn of 1937, he spent several months holed up in the Hotel Florida in Madrid. The top floors of the hotel had been blown away, coming under bombardment some 30 times while he stayed in two rooms which he shared with his then lover and future third wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.
Hemingway spent some of that time writing a play which never fully saw the light of day and which only now, seven decades later, is being staged in the US. The Fifth Column is Hemingway's only full-length play (he also wrote a one-act drama on the theme of crucifixions that is apparently deeply forgettable) and as far as anyone knows it has only been put on stage in the Soviet Union in 1963 and once by Michael Powell in Scotland in the 1940s.
Now it is being given royal treatment at New York's Mint Theater, a wonderfully intimate space tucked away in a nondescript office building near Times Square. The theatre, which has made something of a name for itself in discovering, or rediscovering, interesting lost works, does a fine job at bringing out the best from Hemingway's play, while minimising its fairly glaring weaknesses.
The play explores the conflicting emotions of a young American called Philip Rawlings who is posing as a journalist but is really working as a counter-espionage officer for the Republican side as it seeks to repel Franco's advance on the capital. On the one hand, he is fully committed to the cause; on the other, he falls in love with a beautiful fellow American, Dorothy Bridges.
It is perhaps no wonder that the writer didn't push overly hard to have his piece performed. At three hours, it is rambling and unfocused, its considerable energy in need of greater artistic control.
The other problem with it is that although Hemingway may have been admirable in putting his life on the line in Spain, his portrayal of the interaction between Rawlings and Bridges is maddeningly one-sided. Rawlings is full of testosterone and duty; he drinks far too much, but he also cares too much about what is right. Bridges, by contrast, seems to spend most of her time lounging around in a silk nightgown fretting about whether her new fox fur coat hangs properly about her slender body.
What makes this stereotypical disparity all the more difficult to swallow is that it is impossible not to see Hemingway himself in Rawlings and Gellhorn in Bridges. Sexy and sexually active Gellhorn certainly was, but a leggy blonde airhead? Absolutely not.
To some extent, the Gellhorn subtext of the work makes up for the play's artistic shortcomings by adding historical curiosity. The acting too goes a long way towards making up the deficit. Kelly AuCoin is taut and intense as Rawlings, Heidi Armbruster manages to salvage some dignity from the limited character Hemingway gives her as Bridges, and the supporting cast is universally strong.
What the evening leaves you with is a greater insight into Hemingway's huge strengths and large blind spots. And it also leaves you with a burning question: why on earth, after all that, did Gellhorn agree to tie the knot?
