Giant (Royal Court Theatre, London)
Best-selling children’s book author and World War II fighter pilot Roald Dahl is the latest historical figure to be placed in the public eye and held accountable for historical racist comments.
The court in question is the Royal Court Theater in Chelsea, where Dahl performs in the guise of John Lithgow – best known as Winston Churchill in The Crown and from the TV series Third Rock From The Sun.
Here, Mark Rosenblatt’s new play explores the fallout from repugnant anti-Semitic insinuations Dahl made in 1983 in a review of a book – God Cried – by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy, about the bombing of Lebanon the year before.
The setting is a ramshackle garden extension at Dahl’s country house in Buckinghamshire.
John Lithgow in Giant at the Royal Court Theater in Sloane Square, London
Romola Garai, John Lithgow, Elliot Levey and Rachael Stirling in Giant at the Royal Court Theater
He goes through proofs of his new book The Witches, in the presence of his British and American publishers, both of whom happen to be Jewish.
Trouble comes when his nervous, otherwise admiring American publisher (Romola Garai), makes excuses for his venomous comments to appease the American market.
Not only is Dahl unwilling, he lies to her. But what’s truly shocking and impressive about Nicholas Hytner’s production isn’t that Dahl is unmasked; this is a public issue. Instead, it is the fact that the piece is a violent, incendiary provocation. It contains things that many people – Jews, Israelis, anti-Semites and the impartial masses – may be thinking but are too afraid to express in public. It’s not just about Dahl, it’s about all of us. And with all-out war looming in the Middle East, the timing couldn’t be grimmer.
At times last night, Lithgow’s brilliant, brash, unashamed performance reduced the theater to a shocked, breathless silence. And he’s also a Dahl ringer.
John Lithgow and Elliot Levey in Giant at the Royal Court Theatre
John Lithgow, Elliot Levey and Romola Garai in Giant at the Royal Court Theatre
But Rosenblatt’s game also dares to show another side to him. His scathing humor that won him both friends and enemies, how he glosses over his cruelty as ‘a direct kind’, and excuses himself with his famous back pain.
All of this is a signal for Dahl to be roundly reprimanded – and Garai’s intimidated American publisher does so with fierce anger, identifying him as a vicious belligerent child for holding an entire people responsible for the actions of a single government.
But as the soothing English publisher, Elliot Levey urges her to ignore Dahl, just as he did the playground quips or his aunt’s hideous wallpaper. And Rachel Stirling, while Dahl’s fiancée tries to keep the peace with icy Englishness, the anxious Roald will spoil his chances for a knighthood.
The play goes off the boil after the intermission, but it retains the powerful sense that all the characters are no better or worse than us.
The message is that this ugly, persistent issue of anti-Semitism is something we must all take care of, as a matter of extreme and present urgency.