It is one thing to set about writing your first play. It is quite another to find yourself on the end of a phone call from the director Nicholas Hytner saying that he not only wants to direct it but is suggesting that John Lithgow should be its star.

“It was an amazing, transformative moment,” admits theatre director and now playwright Mark Rosenblatt. The call happened in late December 2022. Hytner was responding to Rosenblatt’s first draft of Giant, a play about the much-loved children’s author and self-confessed antisemite Roald Dahl which starts previewing today. Rosenblatt first approached Hytner about it in 2018, though not as a playwright.

Stellar cast: Romola Garai, Rachael Stirling, John Lithgow and Elliot Levey in rehearsal for Giant (c) Manuel Harlan

“I was just looking to find a producer who might house the project and help develop it,” says Rosenblatt. With him as director? “Yes. I had no ambition to write a play. I had never even thought about writing a play. Playwriting seems to me – and still does – like one hell of a thing to try to hold an audience’s attention through language.”

But rewinding back to that call.  “I was in the top floor of the house [in East Finchley] in the spare room/office. My wife was with our little baby downstairs waiting because she knew that I was going to be on the phone with him. I thought he was just gonna politely let me down. I remember going downstairs to tell my wife and we both just lay down.”

A now fully upright Rosenblatt and I are sitting in a Battersea coffee shop before that day’s rehearsal. Hytner has compiled an impressive cast to add to his star Lithgow. It includes Elliot Levey as Tom Maschler, Dahl’s Jewish publisher in Britain, and Romola Garai as Jessie Stone, Maschler’s counterpart in America, who was also Jewish. The play is set in the summer of 1983 in Gipsy House, Dahl’s family home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Dahl had recently written a review of a book about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon for the Literary Review. Rather like Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children (which we will come to later), Dahl’s review effectively lumped together all Jews and the actions of the IDF.

John Lithgow in rehearsal for Giant (c) Manuel Harlan

“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,” wrote the creator of Willy Wonka. He also referred to “powerful American Jewish bankers” and asserted that the United States was “utterly dominated” by them.

Later that year he offered his views about why it was that Jews were persecuted. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he said. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” He went on, “...we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do –that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”

So you can see why Rosenblatt thought that a meeting between Dahl and his “inner circle” of Jewish publishers might make a good play. But the idea didn’t start with Dahl. It began in 2017 with what Rosenblatt describes as “a blurring” of conversations about Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Tessa Bonham Jones in rehearsals for Giant (c) Manuel Harlan

“As a British Jew I became concerned about explicitly antisemitic stereotyping and prejudice. There was a lot going on in the period from the investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party and I was very aware of the language being used by people – sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously. I felt quite passionate about it and I thought well, maybe we could find a way of dramatising it.”

Up until that moment Dahl had not figured in Rosenblatt’s thinking. Like many people he had loved the author while growing up.

“He was the wallpaper of my childhood. But then I remembered my old mucker had been accused of antisemitism. As I looked it up there was this [same] blurring about the actions of the Israeli government and the Israeli army going into Lebanon in 1982 with a whole series offensive antisemitic stereotyping. He describes Israelis and sometimes the Jews – he doesn’t make much of a distinction – as bestial. To me all of that taps into something very medieval.”

It was Hytner who suggested to Rosenblatt the “big stepping stone” of writing the play. He had spent his professional life in the theatre as a director, beginning with a production of The Dybbuk in 1999, for which he won the JMK Young Directors Award. It was followed by a superb production of CP Taylor’s play Bread and Butter about the friendship between two Jewish men in Glasgow’s Gorbals.

So good was it I wrote then that Rosenblatt, in his twenties at the time, would one day become a figure of national significance in British theatre. He later had productions at the Arcola and Shakespeare’s Globe and there was a directing stint at the West Yorkshire (now Leeds) Playhouse and also at the National Theatre, where he helped develop new work. Yet vibrant though his career has been, would it be unkind to suggest that promise hadn’t quite emerged?

“That’s a dagger to the heart,” he says with just enough sincerity to only be half-joking. Sorry, I say, regretting the question. But what lay behind it was an unspoken compliment, that his work was invariably excellent. Among the more conspicuous highlights of a vibrant career is the season of plays at the Arcola that his company Dumbfounded produced in 2005 for which he directed Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 dissection of Viennese antisemitism, Professor Bernhardi. So Giant is not the first time Rosenblatt has been moved to address the subject on stage. However, it can’t go unnoticed that the particular stage on which Rosenblatt’s play is being performed has itself been at the centre of several antisemitism controversies.

The most recent was the Hershel Fink affair when the Royal Court staged Al Smith’s play Rare Earth Mettle (2021), which featured a fictional, morally corrupt tycoon who had been given a Jewish name. It was later changed when it was strenuously pointed out that the theatre was perpetuating antisemitic tropes. Then there is Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children (2009) directed by the Court’s then artistic director Dominic Cooke, which, much like Dahl, apparently blamed all Jews for what it saw as Israel’s crimes.

Richard Hope in rehearsals for Giant (c) Manuel Harlan

“I saw it and I talked to Caryl. She probably won’t remember but I went over to her and Dominic in the foyer and expressed what I thought were uncomfortable elisions,” he says. However, Giant, Rosenblatt is keen to point out, is not a Royal Court response to those controversies in the way that Jonathan Freedland’s 2022 play Jews. In Their Own Words was.

“I think the play [Giant] is being programmed because the Royal Court really liked it and not as a counterbalance to anything [in the past]. The new artistic director [David Byrne] has obviously taken on a theatre that has some of these issues connected to it, but they weren’t on his watch.”

Still, Rosenblatt is well aware of the context. He says the team behind his play are expecting the Court’s controversial past to be raised in interviews like this. And now that it has he says: “I hope that some of the conversations in my play offer some kind of balance to the kinds of ideas that were in Seven Jewish Children.”

On paper it does. From the passage I read Giant confronts Dahl’s comments head-on. It is also written with a fizzing wit. Yet it is not a full-frontal attack on the author. Rosenblatt has sought to show “how he said what he said” and not just to paint a “pantomime villain”.

“I’m interested in how antisemitism works,” he explains. “I’m interested in a certain English clubroom kind of antisemitism that is normalised with banter.”

I ask if Dahl’s antisemitism was the kind that grows out of an initial sympathy for Jewish suffering, but which can’t abide Jewish strength.

“I can’t speak for Roald Dahl,” says Rosenblatt carefully. “But the Dahl in my play feels a certain betrayal. He was in the RAF and sees himself as having honourably helped to create a sanctuary for the these poor [Jewish] people.”

Suddenly there is a perception that the people who had been oppressed had land, an army and power and strength.

“There is a jump to be made,” says Rosenblatt.

Does he know what is next after this star-studded debut play opens? “I am going to write another play.” he says. Is he a playwright now? “I don’t know what I am. I’m definitely someone who has discovered they can write a play. It’s been an amazing surprise to me. Who knew?”

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Giant is at The Royal Court

royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/giant/