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The first professional US production of Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War play The Fifth Column has opened in New York, 70 years after it was written, begging the question, "What took so long?"
Director Jonathan Bank says people should not assume the delay was because the play is no good. "That's the prejudice. That's the huge hurdle that you have to get over," said Bank, artistic director of the Mint Theatre Company, which specialises in reviving long-forgotten or newly discovered plays at its 100-seat, Off-Broadway theatre.
He said: "Having done a couple of dozen very good plays that people have forgotten about over the years, I've realised there just doesn't have to be a good reason a play falls out of sight."
Hemingway wrote The Fifth Column in Madrid in 1937, when the city was under siege and he was staying in the Hotel Florida as a foreign correspondent.
