Giant
Royal Court | ★★★★✩
Reviewed by John Nathan
For Jewish parents Roald Dahl’s books present a dilemma that is not quite the same as it is with the art made by other antisemites, such as the music of Wagner or the poetry of T. S. Eliot – titans who can be avoided without diminishing the cultural life of one’s children (Eliot’s Cats excepted). For my part I would rather raise my offspring on the brilliant storytelling of an antisemite than on the drivel of imitators such as David Walliams.
However, Mark Rosenblatt’s gripping new play, which is anchored by a superb John Lithgow as a world-weary Dahl, raises more than the hoary old question of whether art should be judged by the behaviour of the artist who created it – the answer to which is no, it shouldn’t, obviously.
Set in the summer of 1983 in Dahl’s Buckinghamshire house during renovations, the argument that erupts in this most English of settings has an unnerving contemporary feel, what with Israel again once again at war in Lebanon.
It was however Israel’s 1982 conflict in that country that led Dahl to publicly conflate Jews everywhere with the actions of the IDF. Appalled by the images in a book that captured the suffering of Beirut civilians, Dahl’s review of the publication was an antisemitic rant.
“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion,” it said.
It is not until halfway through Nicholas Hytner’s tense production that this review is heard. The moment arrives during the evening’s most heated exchange when it is read to the unrepentant author himself by Romola Garai’s Jessie Stone, a (fictional) representative of Dahl’s American publisher who also happens to be Jewish.
This moment alone is worth the price of a ticket. The scene has a whiff of Jewish revenge fantasy about it. It is not quite on the level of Inglorious Basterds, the Tarantino kill-fest in which Jews who look like Brad Pitt take out Nazis. But still, in this play Dahl – whose criticism of Hitler was quaintly underpowered when he described the mass murder as a “rotter” – is at least made to listen to and account for his words. Jessie also imposes some conspicuously absent context on Dahl’s review; that Israel was being attacked along its northern border.
Up until then Dahl’s (real life) British publisher Tom Maschler who escaped the Nazis as a child and who is played by Elliot Levey as a supremely anglicised Jew, is attempting a more subtle approach to coax an apology from his treasured author. Dahl’s new fiancée Felicity (Rachael Stirling) is in league with this endeavour. Like Maschler she has a huge stake in Dahl being content and his books being bought.
However, affronted by attempts to censor him as he sees it, the author cannot help but lob grenades into the conversation whenever the discourse threatens to become civil. Was Stone once Stein?, he asks of the American. The tone is one of idle curiosity but every Jew in the room knows there is a more sinister motive behind the question.
Rosenblatt is careful to stay measured. His Dahl is a complex figure. Superbly played by Lithgow with lofty disdain for his critics and fathom-deep understanding of what it is to be a child, this is a portrait of a flawed humanitarian. If I have a gripe it is that the second act stalls at the destination arrived at by the first. Yet there are nuances about being Jewish here that are rarely if ever reflected by top theatre practitioners in this country: the contrast between the diffidence of British Jews (superbly conveyed by Levey) in the face of antisemitism and the zero tolerance of their American counterparts (terrifically embodied by Garai); and the way British Jews (Levey again) are harried by liberal gentiles into accounting for Israel’s actions.
Romola Garai in rehearsals for Giant Credit: Manuel Harlan
Yet it is not the imagined version of Dahl that is the most damning but the author’s own words, deployed here to chilling effect. Rosenblatt’s considerable achievement is to reveal the paradox of a man whose hatred of Jews was as deep as his love of children.
