Who Does This Playwright Think He Is? Hemingway?

By WILBORN HAMPTON, Published: March 28, 2008, The New York Times

Beneath the image of the ice-in-the-veins alpha male that Ernest Hemingway cultivated in his novels, there always lurked a romantic. In “The Fifth Column,” Hemingway’s play about love and espionage in the Spanish Civil War, now being presented by the Mint Theater Company, the tough guy with a heart of gold is center stage.

Richard Termine for The New York Times. Heidi Armbruster and Kelly AuCoin in "The Fifth Column."

Hemingway wrote the play in 1937 when he and Martha Gellhorn, the future Mrs. Hemingway No. 3, were in Madrid during its siege by Franco’s troops and their Nazi allies. Philip Rawlings and Dorothy Bridges, the two main characters, happen to be journalists holed up in the Florida Hotel in Madrid, covering that same conflict and eking out an existence on tinned foie gras. Rather, journalism is Rawlings’s cover. He’s really doing mysterious work on behalf of the anti-Franco forces. It’s a romanticized view of a war correspondent’s life that only Hollywood could find credible.

Rawlings and Bridges begin an affair that in days leads them to contemplate giving up their war-groupie life. Suddenly Rawlings begins to pine for domestic bliss behind a white picket fence, or at least for a quiet villa in St.-Tropez. It’s never very clear exactly what Rawlings and his secret band are up to, and one of the problems with the play is that this lack of specificity fails to engage the audience — either with Rawlings’s mission or Bridges’s seduction of him.

A bigger problem is the couple’s characters. Dorothy is vain and spoiled, a daughter of privilege more interested in a wartime bargain on a fox coat than what happens in the war. (Is that really how he saw Gellhorn?) Philip is conceited and arrogant, an incipient alcoholic who drinks his breakfast and has blackouts yet is irresistible to women. Hemingway’s heroes have always been something of a stereotype, and Philip fits the mold... [συνέχεια ΕΔΩ]

Σχετικά κείμενα:

Theater Review | 'The Maddening Truth': Travels With Hemingway: That’s Not All She Wrote (February 1, 2008)

Hemingway, Your Letter Has Arrived (February 10, 2008)

Times Topics: Ernest Hemingway

Review: 'The Fifth Column' (March 7, 1940) [pdf]