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 The pair will be familiar to fans of the writer and of
journalist Martha Gelhorn as they fall in love and feud in their
rooms in the Hotel Florida while Franco's forces shell the city.
The play received a cool reception when it was published in 1938
and has rarely been performed since. Now, 80 years from the
start of the conflict that defined an era, it is making its
London debut with a three-week run at the Southwark Playhouse.
The production is staged by Two's Company, which specializes in
resurrecting forgotten works of the 20th century.
"Hemingway was writing it in the middle of the civil war, in his
hotel room. He had no idea how the war would finish. There was
no hindsight involved. That was what attracted us," producer
Graham Cowley said.
It also has a particular resonance today in its depiction of
war, repression, foreign intervention and civilian suffering.
Hemingway was already a celebrated novelist when he showed up in
Spain to cover the conflict and he put his reputation behind the
Republican cause in its fight against the fascists.
Gelhorn was a young journalist when she met him in Madrid, where
they embarked on an affair despite him being married. They were
later to wed but split acrimoniously after several years.
She became a legendary war correspondent, revered by new
generations of reporters, and always refused to discuss her
relationship with the literary lion.
As the play's love affair between Philip Rawlings and Dorothy
Bridges unfolds, the action contrasts the idealism of foreign
volunteers and the ruthlessness of the rival factions.
Rawlings is actually a Republican counter-espionage agent,
involved in the arrest, torture and execution of fascist
infiltrators. (The phrase "The Fifth Column" comes from a
Francoist general's boast that he had four columns outside the
city and a fifth inside.)
In his introduction, Hemingway acknowledged that writing of
Republican misdeeds would earn him criticism from the left.
WOMANIZING AND DRINKING
Actor Simon Darwen, as Rawlings, said he was playing the
fictional character rather than Hemingway himself.
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"The role is written how Hemingway would have liked to have been
seen. The womanizing and drinking, that's true, but the action, the
military stuff it's a 'Boy's Own' portrayal," he told Reuters during
a break in rehearsal.
"Rawlings is a guy who is very jaded and very tired and his job is
taking a toll on him. But there is love for Dorothy. He convinces
himself he can't have her and his work, so he makes the choice. To
be so awful to her so that she pushes him away."
Dorothy resembles Gelhorn in looks, but not in character.
"Gelhorn was one of a kind," said Alix Dunmore, who plays Dorothy.
"Absolutely fearless and a junkie for war...and not that interested
in sex. She was always going off to war."
"The 'Fifth Column' has a version of her that was clingy and needy
and flippant and fluffy and it seems it was the other way round.
Hemingway has written a fantasy version of himself."
Stephen Ventura, who plays the hotel manager, had more than just a
professional interest in the play.
His grandfather was a Spanish union activist in Barcelona who fled
over the Pyrenees to escape Franco’s victorious forces in 1939.
After spending time in internment camps in France and Britain, he
settled in Manchester and worked for the council.
"He couldn't go back. Franco was busy enacting reprisals against the
remnants of the opposition," Ventura said.
It was important to show the local experience of the war, he said.
While the foreigners are eating delicacies brought in by diplomats
and drinking at Chicote's bar, the Madrilenos are, in the words of
the prostitute Anita, "eating water soup".
(Editing by Louise Ireland)
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