How Giant, a Provocative New Play, Tackles Roald Dahl’s Antisemitism

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(Bloomberg) — The summer of 1983 was a tough time to be—and to be around—Roald Dahl, according to Mark Rosenblatt, whose play about the iconic author, Giant, has just opened at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End. Dahl, then 66, was recently divorced; his fiancée was renovating his home, so he was living amid a construction mess while working on edits of The Witches; and the press was tearing him apart for a review he penned about a book on the 1982 Israel-Lebanon conflict. His essay went beyond criticism of Israeli actions and was widely denounced as antisemitic. 

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“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,” Dahl wrote.

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Giant is set in the aftermath of Dahl’s explosive review and centers on a growing conflict between Dahl, his British-Jewish publisher Tom Maschler and a fictional Jewish New Yorker named Jessie Stone, sent by his American publishing house to get Dahl to apologize and smooth things over before the release of his book. But Dahl, in the words of Maschler in the show, is “a human boobytrap. And now, guess what, surprise surprise, boom!”

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John Lithgow plays Dahl as a larger-than-life figure who capriciously jumps between empathy, comedic relief and racism. In the performance I saw, the entire theater let out a gasp of shock in the second act when he went on a deeply antisemitic tirade.

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Giant has been the talk of the town in London since it premiered last fall at West London’s Royal Court Theatre and won a host of Olivier awards, including best new play and best actor for Lithgow’s towering performance. The play is a showcase for the actor’s formidable talents, but it’s also the best kind of theater—one that sparks debate and makes you think long after the curtain closes. It’s set 42 years ago, but the dialogue and conversations about Israel, identity politics, antisemitism and separating the art from the artist feel strikingly modern.

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Dahl’s antisemitism wasn’t a secret—five years ago, his family apologized for the hurt caused by his comments—and after his death in 1990, Abraham Foxman, the then-director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote “talent is no guarantee of wisdom. Praise for Mr. Dahl as a writer must not obscure the fact that he was also a bigot” in an op-ed in the New York Times. This is the fundamental conundrum with which Rosenblatt’s play grapples.

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Giant is Rosenblatt’s first foray as a playwright. He’s a director who’s helmed works at Shakespeare’s Globe, London’s National Theatre and off-Broadway. “I wasn’t a writer,” he says, but he’d become fascinated by Dahl’s complex legacy. “I pitched the idea to Nick Hytner,” Rosenblatt says. “He ended up suggesting I have a go at writing it.” And Hytner ended up directing the show.

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Rosenblatt, who’s Jewish, says the play doesn’t settle for easy answers. A few days before opening night, I spoke with him about what inspired him to write the show, the evolution of his feelings on the beloved author’s work, and collaborating with Lithgow. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.