So which sort of giant are we talking about in Mark Rosenblatt’s new play? The Big Friendly type or something altogether more unpleasant? Very much that latter, as it turns out. This astonishingly good writing debut by the longtime director focuses on the fallout from a 1983 book review penned by Roald Dahl, the children’s author — played here, sensationally well, by John Lithgow.
The book, God Cried, was an account of the Israeli army’s siege of West Beirut in 1982; Dahl’s review was riddled with antisemitism, conflating the actions of the state of Israel with the will of the Jewish people. The play opens as Dahl is visited by his publishers (both of whom happen to be Jewish) for a tense lunch and pressed to retract or apologise. Eventually, after appearing — highly reluctantly — to concede some ground, Dahl doubles down by giving an interview to the New Statesman that is even more offensive.
The lunch is imagined; the interview comments, however, are verbatim. And Rosenblatt, in this terrific staging by Nicholas Hytner, carves his way nimbly through a thorny thicket of arguments about the interplay between prejudice and political viewpoint, between the artist and the art. Given the current conflict in the Middle East, the drama could not feel more timely.
Rosenblatt is not unsympathetic towards Dahl, making plain his despair over the suffering of Palestinian children and touching on his personal tragedy (Dahl’s son was brain damaged in a car accident). But he also gives an unflinching account of the author’s blatant antisemitism and capacity for vicious behaviour. It’s a nuanced portrait, intent on unpicking the cognitive dissonance and blurred lines that can allow racism to flourish.
To begin with, Dahl comes over simply as irascible, grumbling about his painful back, the placements of Quentin Blake’s illustrations for his forthcoming book, The Witches, and the noise of the house renovations his fiancée, Felicity Crosland, has introduced. She and Dahl’s UK publisher Tom Maschler — Rachael Stirling and Elliot Levey, both brilliantly subtle — tiptoe around him, trying to impress on him the impact his views could have on his sales. But Dahl’s little digs at Maschler, a Holocaust survivor, suggest something nastier than backache. And when the representative of the American publishers arrives — Jessie Stone, a fictitious character — things become really ugly.
Romola Garai is great as Stone, still and clenched as Dahl pushes and needles her, until she suddenly lets rip in a blazing speech. In contrast, Levey’s Maschler remains emollient, reluctant to be drawn into the argument, but finally snapping at Dahl’s awful description of him as a “house Jew”.
And at the heart is Lithgow, quite superb as Dahl, rolling from avuncular charm to petulance to cruel sarcasm. Around him, Bob Crowley’s design sets a dining room table adrift in a sea of ladders and plastic sheeting: a room, like the grim issues raised in the play, unfinished.
★★★★☆
To November 16, royalcourttheatre.com
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Hamas , widely supported in Gaza and supported by Iran, Hizbollah and the Houthis, poses an existential threat to Israel (and to some degree to diaspora Jews) and therefore they have a right to self defense. They haven’t built factories to gas and eradicate an entire population. The Germans, aided by many willing non Germans, executed 33,000 unarmed Jews over a couple of days at Babi Yar - those Jews weren’t hiding an arsenal of rockets under their children’s’ bedrooms.
Drawing Parallels between Israel and Nazis is an ahistorical nonsense.
The next generation will examine history and correctly accuse you of complicity.