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There’s no more urgent play in London right now than Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant, and no better performance than John Lithgow’s in it as an irascible, cruel, needling Roald Dahl. This blistering piece of theatre deals with the fallout of a book review Dahl wrote in 1982, on the eve of the publication of The Witches, in which his criticism of Israel’s brutal retaliation against rocket attacks from Lebanon bled into outright antisemitism.
Dahl’s second wife-to-be Felicity Crosland and Jewish representatives of his British and American publishers try to persuade him to apologise or at least qualify his views, which only spurs the vicious old curmudgeon to greater offence. The atmosphere in Nicholas Hytner’s production is electric throughout.
The play – Rosenblatt’s first, he’s usually a director – was conceived four years ago and programmed by the Royal Court in 2023, days before Hamas’s October 7 outrage and Israel’s punishing, ongoing response. It remains depressingly current.
It’s not depressing to watch though, but by turns hilarious, searing and deeply moving. This is due to Rosenblatt’s multifaceted portrayal of Dahl, interpreted with sublime nuance by Lithgow. The author is physically pained by spinal problems and mentally by noisy renovations at his sun-drenched retreat, Gipsy House in Great Missenden.
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He’s cantankerous, rude, heedless of the feelings of the watchful and exasperated “Liccy” (Rachael Sterling, the best I’ve ever seen her) and their cheery Antipodean helper Hallie (Tessa Bonham Jones). He whinges constantly about contemporaries, including his genius illustrator Quentin Blake, and goads his friend and publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey) with niggling slurs. When confronted by Maschler’s (fictional) American junior Jessica Stone, he’s unforgivably, cold-bloodedly savage.
Yet he is also capable of great kindness and empathy, intuiting that Stone, like him, knows the bittersweet pain of caring for a brain-damaged child. He’s a kid himself (“yum yum”) when ice cream arrives, and perhaps this retained boyishness is what allows him to pick “a glorious, playful path through the chaos of childhood”, as Maschler puts it, for his adoring young readers. Dahl insists his address should stay in the phone book so children can write to him, even though he’s received death threats after the contentious review.
Lithgow gives us the whole man, right down to the guilty satisfaction he feels when he scents a knighthood in the offing, and the obscene relish he takes in sabotaging it. When I saw the play at the Court I thought the women’s roles were underwritten. But this time Stone (Aya Cash, replacing Romola Garai in this West End transfer) feels more rounded, her slow-burning rage finding full voice before the interval blackout.
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I loved Sterling’s Liccy, serenely navigating the demands of a man who is a physical, literary and egotistical giant, as well as a massive arsehole. Bonham Jones’s Hallie is an avatar for the audience, a shocked onlooker forced to decide where she stands on the political divide – and, implicitly, whether the man, his views and his works can be separated. She also gets one of the best jokes.
Levey’s Maschler, smoothly at home with his German Jewish heritage and his place in the English literary establishment, gets the very best gag though. Challenged by Stone where he’d go if England turned on jews, his blithe answer is: “Provence”. The only role that’s truly underwritten is that of Dahl’s big friendly gardener Wally (Richard Hope), a convenient rustic sounding board for Dahl’s views and someone he can share memories of wartime service with.
Bob Crowley’s set shows a once-serene house in turmoil, the back ripped off and its innards and past tragedies exposed. This is a terrific piece of work all round, that’s already been showered with Olivier and Critic’s Circle awards. Lithgow’s tremendous performance will loom large in the memory for a long time.
Until 2 Aug, gianttheplay.com.
