Giant
I have just experienced one of the most thrilling theatrical tour-de-force I have ever witnessed: John Lithgow.
Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play Giant deftly blends fact and invention to dramatise a controversial chapter in the children’s author’s life, earning three Olivier Awards ahead of its West End transfer.
Bob Crowley’s naturalistic, cluttered set evokes a mood of looming catastrophe: precarious steel beams loom above, a pile of walking sticks gathers below — a world burdened.
At the heart of the brainy drama is Dahl’s incendiary 1982 article for the Literary Review, which unleashed a wave of public outrage, death threats, and even required police protection outside his home.
John Lithgow effortlessly delivers a magnetic turn as Dahl, a “fu**** human boobytrap.” He has an uncanny physical resemblance to the author, channeling a bear with a sore head (building work is enraging the author) — cranky, sharp-witted, and in pain. Physical pain (his back is sore), emotional pain (his son Theo developed hydrocephalus after being hit by a taxi, aged four months), and political pain (today, he’d be cancelled).
I loved Lithgow’s brittle explosiveness. Never overdone.
In the opening sequence, Elliot Levey, typically superb as Dahl’s long-time editor Tom Maschler, and Rachael Stirling as Felicity, Dahl’s future second wife — both navigating the minefield of getting Dahl to apologise publicly.
Lithgow captures Dahl’s complex duality: brilliant yet bitter, childlike yet domineering.
Aya Cash’s Jessie Stone — an emissary from Dahl’s American publisher sent to contain the fallout — simmers with urgency, her calm masking a rising tide of frustration.
“Are you Jewish?” Dahl fires at Stone barely a minute into their meeting. Their time together becomes increasingly upsetting.
This sophisticated play draws out the obvious and turns itself into a classic, and is permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts.
Dahl, having appeared ready to back down, instead breezily phones the New Statesman to deliver a fresh volley of antisemitic vitriol. The words, chillingly drawn from his own remarks: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on them for no reason.”
While Dahl’s children’s books remain beloved, his history of antisemitic remarks – which had previously largely been overlooked – clouds his legacy.
In an interview with the Independent in 1990, months before his death, he described himself as antisemitic and railed against the “Jewish-owned” media.
He told the publication: “It began in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon. They killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut. It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned …
“I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: 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 … ”
Wow.
In its own terms, this is the best acted – and paced – and slyly entertaining production in the West End currently.
A lot of reviews note the ‘timeliness’ of the play owing to the fact in the second act, Rosenblatt constructs a monologue for Dahl in which the author reflects on the severe injuries sustained by a Lebanese child during an Israeli bombing raid, alleges the existence of a clandestine Ashkenazi conspiracy tied to the foundational history of the Israeli state.
But the drawing-room play is much more than that—it’s a powerful exploration of anti-Semitism, a wound that feels more exposed now than at any other time in my life.
This production is sure to transfer to Broadway, and no doubt scoop up some Tony Awards next season.
Frankly, Giant has a powerful cumulative effect; when it’s over you know you’ve seen something.
This is unmissable British theatre.
Giant runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London until August 2025
