Summer 1940. On a peaceful morning in her Washington D.C. living room, widow Fanny Farrelly anxiously awaits the return of her daughter and her German husband, fleeing Europe with their children. As ...

Custom image of Paul Lukas, Better Davis, and an Oscar statue between them for Watch on the Rhine Credit: Image by Nimesh Niyomal There's a concerning resurgence of nationalism and global political ...

It was against that complacent background that Lillian Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine, a seductive call to arms that knew its audience of New York’s WASPish well-to-do, so took good care not to ...

Lillian Hellman’s 1941 call to arms Watch on the Rhine hasn’t been seen in London for 40 years. It is a fascinating play but a profoundly problematic one and it is to the Donmar’s enormous credit that ...

Even though World War II was well underway in 1940, America was still more than a year away from becoming involved. Written as a call to action for Americans in the early years of the war, Lillian ...

Overall, this is a handsomely mounted, well-acted work that strums reliably on the emotions, but feels inescapably like a museum piece. Scratchy film at the end tells us about the real Jewish-American ...

Rome’s Gothic Wars by Michael Kulikowski Cambridge, 238 pp., $25 When the pans dredged from the river are lined up in a museum, as if on identity parade, it looks as though all the cookware in Roman ...