They say that you should never meet your heroes. Fans of the late British children’s author Roald Dahl, creator of Willy Wonka, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach, are in for a very rude awakening in Mark Rosenblatt’s firecracker of a drama, Giant, which opened on Broadway Monday after an Olivier Award-winning run in London. John Lithgow towers and glowers over the action as Dahl, an oversize curmudgeon who seems to instinctively turn any conversation into a bullying debate where he insists on having the final, knife-twisting word.
As played by Lithgow with stage-owning command, Dahl is intelligent, verbally dexterous, alert to any potential slights, and itching for an argument — preferably one that he can win, even on specious rhetorical grounds. That becomes clear as two members of his publishing team arrive in his countryside home in 1983 to address a real controversy that the author has instigated. In a review of a photo book depicting graphic images of the Israeli Army’s 1982 siege of Beirut that anticipates the current intemperate discourse over Israeli policies in Palestine, Dahl suggests that all Israelis, and all Jews worldwide, are “barbarous murderers” complicit in the violence perpetrated by Israeli military forces. This is the sort of opinion that generates death threats to his countryside estate; it does not help sell books about big friendly giants.
Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), who escaped from Nazi Germany as a child and rose to become the head of Jonathan Cape publishing house, has recruited a Jewish American publishing sales exec, Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), to persuade Dahl to walk back the review, ideally with an apology or at least a clarification. Some American booksellers are threatening to boycott his upcoming book, The Witches, and there are murmurings that the American Library Association might follow suit. Meanwhile, Dahl’s fiancée (and decade-long mistress), Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling), notes that the folks who choose knighthoods loathe controversies of the sort he’s kicking up.
But Dahl is not the apologizing sort, nor does he seem very persuadable. This is partly a celebrity thing, a great man who’s accustomed to demanding deference and respect, but it’s mostly a Dahl thing. He loves an argument, and even while he concedes some indelicate choice of words, he continues to press his case — and to press in an ad hominem way against both Tom and Jessie despite their personal experiences with antisemitism. Dahl sees a moral urgency in Beirut, believing that all right-thinking people, Jews especially, should condemn the immoral actions of Israel. He does not seem similarly bothered by violence perpetrated by the British Empire or the way that his silence on its atrocities might implicate him. His arguments should be familiar to anyone who’s been drawn into heated online (or in-person) discussions about Palestine.
Rosenblatt skillfully introduces both the situation and the characters, allowing the audience to draw the contemporary parallels for ourselves. He’s less skilled at sustaining the drama, or making use justifying the presence of the four characters who occupy the stage for much of its duration. Director Nicholas Hytner makes good use of Bob Crowley’s spare set design, the central drawing room of Dahl’s stately home in the British countryside as it undergoes a gut renovation, with walls down to the studs and a plastic tarp lining a back wall. Would that the owner could submit to a similar conversion. Like the setting, Lithgow’s Dahl is a work in progress, with a boyish energy and a puerile defensiveness that he flashes in equal amounts. And Hytner stages his scenes with a great sense of timing and pace, even when some characters seem to be just standing around.
As the American outsider, Cash delivers a performance of power and subtlety. She’s coached to be diplomatic, to coax and persuade the great author to do the right thing, but Dahl’s persistent and increasingly personal needling lead to an explosive speech at the end of the first act that lays bear the contradictions in Dahl’s worldview. It’s a Tony-worthy tirade. She also pinpoints the writer’s innate childishness — an aspect of his character that makes him such a gifted writer for kids but also an intolerable adult in real life. Levey, meanwhile, adjusts his posture and increasingly furtive facial expression to depict a man whose well-trained tendency toward moderation begins to cross into morally self-compromising appeasement. It’s one reason he’s managed to survive the antisemitism of his British childhood, but even the thread of losing one of his publishing house’s top authors nudges him out of his natural neutrality.
While the British may have a thorough knowledge of Dahl and his history, Americans may be puzzled by details of Dahl’s life and work that Rosenblatt surfaces only in passing. There’s the fact that Patricia Neal, the Oscar-winning actress who bore his five children, accused him of extensive verbal abuse during their marriage, particularly after she recovered from three strokes in the 1960s — and that he divorced her to marry Felicity, their neighbor and good friend. Or that Dahl helped develop a valve to treat the brain disorder hydrocephalus that his son Theo developed after the 4-month-old’s pram was hit by a taxi in 1960. There’s also the fact that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory originally depicted the Oompa-Loompas as African pygmies shipped to Wonka’s factory in crates and paid not with wages but in cacao beans — an unfortunate parallel to the trans-Atlantic slave trade that sparked protests by the NAACP until he agreed to revise later editions. At one point in Giant, Dahl notes the dust-up (“The NAACP chaps were right”) only to make the argument that his apology was about the content of one of his books and not his opinion on a book about Beirut: “This situation, unrelated.”
Rosenblatt stacks the deck as the second act proceeds, when Dahl’s brief flirtation with contrition dissipates. The insecure monster he’s kept mostly hidden inside is finally allowed outside for a chance to play off leash. The writer unleashes a torrent of invective, all carefully sourced from interviews that Dahl actually gave at the time, that obliterates any legitimate arguments he might have about the Israeli government. Delivering these lines with the gusto of a willful boy who knows that he’s being naughty but acts out regardless, Lithgow gives a force-of-nature star turn that renders spotlights superfluous. He’s horrifying, fascinating, and devastating all at once. What’s all the more disturbing is that there are no repercussions from these very real episodes. Dahl would go on to publish more books, including the 1988 classic Matilda, before his death in 2000. Two decades later, his family issued a very posthumous apology for the author’s antisemitic views and the “lasting and understandable hurt” they caused.
Giant is a riveting and timely drama that reminds us of two central truths: the debate over Israel is a long and complicated one where no side comes out unsullied and great artists are often flawed humans with prejudices and blind spots as big as their talent. ★★★★★
GIANT
Music Box Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 28 for $79 to $450