Writer: Mark Rosenblatt
Director: Nicholas Hytner
In Mark Rosenblatt’s play Giant, it is the librarians who should be feared. They hold the power to limit the availability of Roald Dahl’s books, and for his UK and American publishers, that provokes a major marketing crisis. The West End transfer of this acclaimed Royal Court production, now at the Harold Pinter Theatre, comes laden with awards, winning several Olivier and Critics’ Circle prizes, including Best New Play, and is as dazzling as those accolades suggest. A play from a director turned first-time writer who ploughs beneath the (now) troubled reputation of a beloved children’s writer.
Having written a book review widely interpreted as Anti-Semitic, Roald Dahl is visited at home by his publishers, who demand he issue an apology. Over a deeply frustrated lunch, Dahl argues his comments about Israel are made on humanitarian grounds, but Mrs Stone, the Jewish sales rep from his American company, refuses to accept that the author is not the deeply bigoted man she now sees in his work.
Giant is an aggressively evolving conversation taking place across two acts, which in one sense yields little as Dahl and Jessica Stone barely move from their positions during the long afternoon they spend locked in intensive dialogue. In this entirely imagined scenario, what happens around them is Rosenblatt’s focus, and the depths of the play really ask whether their opposing views should and do define who they are. This is far more than a question of whether the products of art can be separated from the person who created them, but fundamentally what humanity is and what are its limits.
Does Dahl’s rage about the bombed hospitals and maiming of children alleviate any of his blanket views, and, likewise, should Mrs Stone’s belief in a safe space and the suffering that led to it be at the cost of other lives? And while Rosenblatt focuses on Dahl more specifically in the second half of the play, he leaves the broader questions open for the audience in an expanded context. This draws out the differences between Mrs Stone’s (an unremitting Aya Cash) American Jewish community and the English Judaism of Dahl’s publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levy, dignified and restrained) who defends his friend by claiming a form of British ‘ragging’ but which isn’t necessarily indicative of Anti-Semitism, or is it?
Rosenblatt’s writing is ferocious across two evenly paced and intense hours of theatre in which the immediate experience, its causes and the potential consequences hang in the air at the same time. His semi-fictional Dahl, played with range and capacity by John Lithgow, is a “human booby trap,” ferociously intelligent, able to twist arguments and words into new meanings, clearly savouring the battle as though he provoked it just to have the fight. Yet he is also sensitive, even thoughtful, as Dahl engages with Mrs Stone over her child and is choked by the memory of his own son. And the whole play becomes a dance, a group of people orbiting this famous man unsure whether to protect, chastise or celebrate him. Is it merely the mood of the afternoon, or is this really him?
Rosenblatt perhaps makes that decision too clearly in the final 10 minutes of Giant in search of a sufficiently dramatic conclusion to send the group on their way but the range of this play, its understanding of author fandom and the scale of protection they are afforded, the force of political hatred and the many things a person can be around and in addition to their single, decisive view makes this a giant of a play in every sense. And with contemporary children’s authors also stepping publicly into highly politicised debates, Rosenblatt’s play feels even more timely than it did last autumn – perhaps here too the librarians will decide what happens next.
Runs until 2 August 2025
