Giant, Harold Pinter Theatre review - incendiary Roald Dahl drama with topical bite

When Mark Rosenblatt was preparing his debut play, the miseries of the assault on Gaza were still over the horizon. Now they are here, another terrible moment in human history that resonates all through Giant. Since the play opened at the Royal Court last year, that ugly hum has grown even louder. Now transferred to the West End, it could have been written to give dramatic form to this most incendiary of talking points.

“Incendiary” is a word that we see author Roald Dahl gleefully welcoming as a compliment when applied to his writing. Indeed, what he seems to achieve in the course of the play seems to be a thorough and deliberate burning of his bridges. The shadow on his personal reputation remains, yet the work still flies high. Giant has set out to explore the issues for itself, by creating a fictitious encounter between the British and American publishers of Dahl’s children’s books at his country home. Only Dahl’s anti-semitic utterances are real.

The year is 1983, and the writer is renovating his home; or rather, his long-standing mistress, set designer Felicity “Liccy” Crosland (Rachael Stirling), is giving it a serious makeover. “Pat” – Dahl’s first wife, the actress Patricia Neal – has collected her last belongings and ceded the ground to the other woman. He is looking forward to a “new life”. But he has just reviewed a book for the Literary Review about the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon, God Cried, in which he is excoriating about the IDF, and Israelis in general, and his publishing minders fear the fallout on sales of his imminent book, The Witches. Already, New York state booksellers are refusing to stock it.

As the awards ceremonies have already indicated, the waspish, unrepentant writer is a whale of a role for John Lithgow, an uncanny Dahl lookalike, and also a soundalike. Onstage almost all the time, he powers the piece with his carefully barbed retorts, his mischief (and malice) lashing out effortlessly at his victims with faultless clipped diction and impeccable comic timing. He’s like a cobra, swaying gently before going in for the kill. A masterclass of a performance.

Mind you, everybody here has the ability to land a line for maximum comic effect. One of the oddities of the play is that, with its drawing-room set, it looks and sounds a lot like an especially dark Ayckbourn number, though one with a fierce forensic intellect at its heart. Even the Australian cook (Tessa Bonham-Jones) gets laughs. Stirling's Liccy is a robust opponent who doesn’t allow Dahl all the liberties he wants, and regularly scores points off him. His UK publisher, Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), on the other hand, is an urbane wit with a comic passion for playing tennis and an ability to deliver a punchline with throwaway brilliance. When Dahl quizzes him relentlessly about his Judaism and wants to know where in London “you chaps” live nowadays, his perfectly timed reply brings the house down.

The humour leavens what could have been a weighty debate, which moves along the same lines as current arguments about what sentient humans should think about the IDF vs Hamas. Most of the arguments in defence of Israel are articulated, sparkily, by a made-up character, Jessica Stone (Aya Cash), the Jewish American sales manager of Dahl’s US publisher, who has arrived to make him feel wanted so he doesn’t flounce off to another company, as he has done before. 

Cash, a Broadway import, is a vital addition to the cast, bringing a sharp, East Coast authenticity to this role. At first suitably polite and deferential, Dahl’s goading produces the protective she-wolf in her, and she ends the first act howling at him to apologise to her and all the other Jews she argues he has insulted in his blanket condemnation of the IDF's massacre of children in Lebanon. 

Rosenblatt has another weapon to add to humour: he shows Dahl being a perceptive, kindly man when children’s suffering is being discussed. The death of one of his children and the terrible maiming of another by an NYC cab reduces him to tears. He also makes Dahl sensitively zero in on Jessica’s family, having noted that she said she still reads Dahl books to her 15-year-old son, a sign that all is not well with the boy.

One of the giants hinted at in the title appears, Dahl’s gardener Wally (Richard Hope), model for The BFG, in almost too blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion near the end of the play. But it motors on teasingly to a climax, just when it seems to have peaked, via a phonecall in which some of Dahl’s actual comments to a journalist are reproduced as reported. The sentence where he cites Hitler causes a palpable intake of breath in the now-hushed audience. 

It’s a neat conclusion to the unrolling of the debate, leaving us to ponder all sides of the issue. We have to decide first how to view Dahl himself. Is he predominantly a bitter, kvetching antisemite, angry at being the text to a “Quentin Blake picture look”, and at being ignored by the honours system because he’s not a literary novelist: at base is he no better than a belligerent, destructive child? Or should we forgive him as a man whose heart breaks at the suffering of children, his books designed to be a comfort to them while trying to open their minds? Despite being “a human booby trap” (Maschler), he is as kind to Jessica as he is vicious, a born entertainer of the young and young at heart. 

Then there’s the issue of how Jews should react to Israel’s behaviour, an argument that feels weighted here against Dahl’s stance, by virtue of his blatant antisemitic opinions having literally almost the final say. Rosenblatt has no easy resolution to offer, why would he? Even so, he has created a drama the West End has too few of, one with a measured intelligence. It’s a play – and a production, ably directed by Nicholas Hytner – worthy of its awards, especially those for Lithgow.  

• Giant is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 2 August
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