This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
In 1983, the much-loved children’s author Roald Dahl gave an immediately notorious interview to the New Statesman in which he outed himself as an anti-Semite.
He told the astonished journalist Michael Coren that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.”
Dahl then declared that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” If anyone in the public eye made such remarks today, it would almost certainly be career-ending. For some reason — maybe because Dahl was the biggest-selling, most beloved writer in the world at the time — it made nothing like such a splash four decades ago.
But the comment did not emerge from nowhere. Dahl had just reviewed God Cried, Tony Clifton’s account of the Israelis’ siege of Beirut, and made various angry, derogatory remarks about the Jews in that, too. Giant, Mark Rosenblatt’s magnificent and timely new play, imagines what occurred in between the publication of the review and the New Statesman interview.
At a time when many West End plays tend towards the modish and tiresome, Nicholas Hytner’s production is almost daringly old-fashioned. Giant is set over a single afternoon in Dahl’s home in Buckinghamshire, where the author, wracked by back pain, is working on the copy edits for The Witches.
The fallout from his article necessitates the arrival of his publisher Tom Maschler and the fictitious character of Jessie Stone, a high-ranking sales executive.
Both attempt to persuade the author to issue either an outright apology or, at the very least, a “clarification”. Dahl, however, is not a figure who has achieved literary and personal success by backing down. The scene is set for perhaps the most thrilling and, at times, difficult exchange of social, political and literary views that London theatre has seen in decades.
It is a mark of nothing less than inspiration to use Dahl and his opinions as a proxy for examining the current Israel-Palestine conflict. Whilst many other plays seem content to take refuge in the most basic sloganeering, it is to Rosenblatt and Hytner’s credit that they commit to a deep exploration of the difficult moral complexities of this most vexed of subjects.
Dahl is passionately pro-Palestinian, Stone equally passionately pro-Israeli and Maschler, a suave figure who is literally and figuratively dressed for tennis, makes an ostentatious show of not caring as long as his star author knuckles down, so that he can get his 3 pm game in with Ian McEwan.
If this makes it sound like a challenging evening in the theatre, it certainly is at points. When the racially charged epithets start flying, there are gasps from an audience who probably wouldn’t blink if they saw them on social media or in the Guardian. But it’s also hilariously funny, thanks to a pitch-perfect cast led by a never better John Lithgow as Dahl.
Lithgow is now in the phase of his career when he seems to have embraced complex and challenging Anglophile roles (his next big part is Dumbledore in the new television adaptation of the work of the other controversial and massively bestselling children’s author) and he’s magnificent here, bringing Dahl to life in all his complexities and contradictions.
Almost effortlessly, he captures the writer’s intellectual assurance, his physical discomfort, his glee when given two kinds of sorbet for pudding and, when he feels disrespected, a bullying petulance that chills.
It’s probably the most impressive big star part since Mark Rylance dominated the stage in Jerusalem 15 years ago (another play that originated at the Royal Court) and it’s a testament to Lithgow that I cannot imagine Giant being staged with any other actor in the lead. He becomes Roald Dahl, and it’s an astonishing performance that has already justly seen him win an Olivier award.
No doubt, if and when the play transfers to Broadway, others will follow. Yet it’s a mark of Rosenblatt’s compassion and humanity that this is an ensemble piece rather than an old-fashioned star vehicle.
Elliot Levey (another Olivier-winner) is perfect as the assured Maschler, whose composure only slips when he is alone with his perceived subordinate, and he can finally vent the anger that he feels.
Aya Cash is superb as Stone, literally backed into a corner by Dahl at one point but fighting back against his anti-Semitism with passion and conviction: all the same, we sense the character’s self-righteousness and priggishness, too.
This is a play of nuance and three dimensions, not agitprop. And even if the great Rachael Stirling has the thinnest role as Dahl’s adoring but decidedly clear-sighted fiancée Felicity, she manages to convey why even this irascible, at times horrible, figure can arouse such deep-rooted feelings of love and loyalty.
There are tiny imperfections. I wasn’t wholly convinced by the conceit that the commercial success of The Witches was ever seriously threatened by Dahl’s remarks, and the device of having the excellent Tessa Bonham Jones’ housekeeper overhearing his Statesman telephone interview at the play’s close, and being horrified by it, seemed unnecessary editorialising in a drama that otherwise scrupulously refuses to take sides.
But they are minor quibbles. Giant is electrifying, unmissable theatre and a chance to see one of the world’s greatest actors take on a part he was born to play.
