Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night and the Specter of War in Eastern Europe

A conversation with Dr. Thomas F. Connolly on Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play

A dictator in Moscow orders the invasion of a smaller Eastern European neighbor. Everyone predicts that his troops will swiftly overrun the weaker country, but instead its citizens mount a ferocious and well-organized resistance. Meanwhile, debate rages in Western Europe and the United States about how — or even whether — to support the resistance.

All of this will sound familiar to anyone who’s been following the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it also describes the events of the so-called Winter War, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939. That conflict provided the backdrop for Robert E. Sherwood’s play There Shall Be No Night, which became a hit on New York and London stages during the Second World War and won him his third Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Dr. Thomas F. Connolly joins us to discuss his article “Re-righting Finland’s Winter War” in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, which explores the play’s history and its striking contemporary resonance.