Giant – exploration of Roald Dahl and antisemitism that speaks to our times

As debut plays go, Giant has some very old and experienced hands behind it. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, who runs the Bridge Theatre (by way of the National Theatre) and written by Mark Rosenblatt, a director of more than two decades, it sounds like cheating to call it a debut although it is indeed Rosenblatt’s first foray into writing for the stage.

You would not know it from a slowly brilliant first act, stupendously performed by its cast, which mixes fact with fiction in its dramatisation of a scandalous moment in the life of the children’s writer Roald Dahl.

It starts off breezily, heading amblingly into what seems like a middle-class drawing room drama, before becoming as dark and sharp-toothed as one of Dahl’s fictive monsters.

It is 1983, Dahl (John Lithgow, fabulous, and bearing uncanny resemblance to the writer) is just about to publish The Witches. We find him irascible, in a kingly, upper-middle-class way, having just moved into a new home while his publisher, Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey, excellent as ever) and soon-to-be second wife, Felicity (Rachael Stirling) buzz around him in an unfurnished kitchen.

The central drama revolves around a book review that Dahl has written and published, on a picture book about the siege of West Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war. In it, he has condemned Israel’s bombings, which have killed 22,000 civilians.

We hear how he has spoken passionately about Palestinian oppression in the past, and now is speaking against the wholesale death of men, women and children in Lebanon – in language that some deem antisemitic.

This kitchen gathering is something of an emergency meeting. “We can make it go away,” says Maschler, a survivor of the Holocaust who has little allegiance to Israel and great loyalty towards this writer-friend.

The play sets up its central conflict when the American Jewish agent, Jessie Stone (Romola Garai, restrained but ready to burst) enters the room. She has been sent by Dahl’s US agency as a damage-limitation exercise. The plan is to get him to apologise, or explain himself, but both agent and publisher creep around their star author, not wanting to upset him. He in turn pokes at Stone, referring to her Jewishness in provoking ways, and we feel the temperature drop when she begins to take the bit.

She accuses him of conflating Israel with Jewishness, and challenges him on his equation of Israel with Nazi Germany. He speaks of Israel’s apartheid system, of Palestinian death and of the responsibilities of Israeli citizens to speak up in protest.

What is apparent, and again resonates, is that Dahl and Jessie refuse to see each other’s point of view. It is sophisticated writing, speaking of Dahl’s predicament but also, directly, to our times, although the debate is inherently lopsided: the divisions between the two camps cannot be equally aired when one side – Dahl’s – is fuelled not only by a righteous sense of injustice but also bigotry.

He is no simple monster, though, or at least not in the first act, when he is also rational, tender, likable. Rosenblatt’s writing steers delicately away from polemic or binary argument and moralising. Dahl speaks of “your lot” to Maschler and generalises about Jews as a “race of people” bearing certain unlikeable traits, alongside his clear and legitimate arguments.

But by the second act, his antisemitism is naked and the drama seems to not quite know where to go, stalled by having to return from the issues of our day back to the fallout around Dahl’s article.

Until then, so many debates are embroidered seamlessly into the drama, from the exploration of Jewishness to the nature of offence – Maschler, as a Jew, never defines Dahl as an antisemite and there is too much complexity in his character to dismiss this as wilful blindness.

Where some theatres impose silence on this subject – the Manchester Royal Exchange has been accused of censorship for one, this debut shows a necessary bravery. This is exactly what theatre is for.