In 2022, the Royal Court Theatre staged a play – I forget the name – with a generic villain called Hershel Fink. According to the Guardian, Fink is “a grasping billionaire trying to monopolise the Earth’s resources”. There was an outcry, of course, and the theatre panicked, investigated itself, and concluded that calling the world’s wickedest man Hershel Fink “could be an antisemitic trope”. You think? I was less surprised by casual bigotry in Chelsea than by the fact the play took five years to write and ran to 15 drafts. And I think I procrastinate.
Now the Royal Court stages Giant, the debut play from the director Mark Rosenblatt, a British Jew. It is about Roald Dahl, and it is a piece of great insight, subtlety and wit. It is sold out, and we should pray for its transfer to the West End and Broadway.
Dahl is fascinating: the leading writer of children’s fiction in the 20th century (we can ignore Enid Blyton and JRR Tolkien wrote for adults, and himself) and a man who openly hated Jews. He was open even with himself and that is his value as a character study. As he approached his death, he admitted he had moved his position from anti-Zionism to antisemitism itself.
The quotes that prove this are gruesome – you will have read them – and, four years ago, the Dahl family offered a strange, half-hearted apology and sold the back catalogue to Netflix.
Dahl’s work lives! I don’t mind this. I welcome it. I understand what he gives to children: an understanding of the pain, hatred and fear that consumed him and which he projected back to the world. Dahl wrote morality tales and I have never wanted to suppress his books. I feel the same way about High Renaissance art. When artists are hostile to Jews or express hostility – Titian can’t be held responsible for the Catholic Church – I want the best of them.
But alongside an acceptance of Dahl’s genius there must be a fair appraisal of his character and Rosenblatt has written what feels like the last word on Dahl. Giant is excoriating for its clear-sighted sympathy: because the audience understand Dahl, and his journey from the anti-Zionism I presume some of them share to obvious Jew hate, they can question themselves. There were gasps on press night as Dahl shrieked his prejudice: “A nasty little cabal of nasty fucking Jews!” It felt as if they had not heard it before: this thing they thought fictional.
Giant is partly a satire on the drawing room farce, which suits the Royal Court. It staged Look Back in Anger in 1956, another satire on the drawing room farce. We find Dahl (John Lithgow) in his drawing room working on proofs for The Witches – his only novel with a hero he didn’t save – and consumed in a PR crisis because, in a book review, he compared Jews to Nazis. Soon, he is engulfed by Jews: his British publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), who existed, and Jessie Stone (Romola Garai), his US sales rep, who didn’t.
Maschler and Stone are Jewish archetypes. Maschler, surely the author in disguise, is witty, subtle and anglicised. He just wants to play tennis. Stone is beautiful, proud and raging. She wants Dahl to understand his own prejudice. She asks the essential question: “You don’t believe Israel should exist, do you?” Dahl can’t answer her: he can’t follow his own logic. He writes about witches.
Later, in a lovely character study of the British Jew – Dahl calls Maschler “House Jew” – Maschler, who loves Kensington and, presumably, good knitwear, pleads not to be an archetype but himself. When Dahl asks him who he is, he says: “Well, I suppose, in the end I’m…Tom Maschler.” It’s quite something to hear a children’s storyteller chided by his publisher for abuse of archetypes.
Rosenblatt gives Dahl all the self-hatred and sorrow of his fiction. I have often thought public antisemites are prone to personal tragedy and Dahl, who lost a sister, a child and a wife, had a glut of it. He was, of course, an outsider too – the child of affluent Norwegians, raised in Wales, of all places – and Rosenblatt, in surrounding him with Jewish refugees (one superficially pliant, one unbending), exposes him as a tinny thing with a solitary gift and a longing for a knighthood that never came. Dahl was a lonely, self-destructive man with a glut for rage. He wrote fairy stories, and at some point, he confused fictional villains with Jews.
When the Dahl family offered their apology in 2020, I was struck by the wording. His antisemitic remarks, they wrote, “stand in marked contrast to the man we knew”. Perhaps. But the playwright knows him and so now do we.
