The name Giant is a joke. The playwright Mark Rosenblatt’s Roald Dahl is not a moral giant – though Dahl was 6’6” – but a lonely one. He does not fit in this world. “I don’t fit in cottages,” John Lithgow’s raging, simpering Dahl tells his Jewish publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey) as the play opens, and there’s a metaphor. This much-anticipated piece, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is about Dahl’s infamous anti-Semitism. It is showing at the Royal Court, which in 2022 staged a play with a generic villain called Hershel Fink: when challenged, theatre management apologised and said, quite idiotically, it did not know that Fink was a Jewish name. Giant is set in 1983 in the dining room of Dahl’s home in Buckinghamshire. What better place to discuss anti-Semitism in England than at a dining table in this theatre?
Giant argues for and against Israel with a composure as uncanny as a Dahl plot. But it’s also about identity, and seeking the place in which you belong, which is apt: Dahl wrote children’s fiction, after all. Dahl’s home, Gypsy House, is well-named: gypsies wander. While Dahl fed on, and renewed, a very English vernacular (his novels summon a mid-century England both playful and agonised, as he was), Dahl was not English: rather, his father insisted on an English public-school education for his only son. Dahl was the boarding-school abused, Welsh-bred son of affluent Norwegian parents; and Maschler was a German-Jewish child brought from Nazi Europe to England when he was five. Despite the arrival of Jessie Stone, an American Jew played with equal fire and silence by Romola Garai, this struggle is between two refugees.
Dahl, prematurely aged at 67 and in agony from a war injury, is in crisis. His marriage to the American actress Patricia Neal is over, and he is living with his mistress Felicia “Liccy” Crosland (Rachael Stirling), who is as calm and appropriate as he is mercurial and weird: he’s like a male Vivien Leigh. Dahl accuses Liccy of sexual longing for Maschler, a man who depends on tennis and who “f**ks without painkillers”. Dahl can’t, which is a fine punishment for a philanderer as fragile as he.
The builders are in, and Dahl cannot hear himself (could he ever?). The lawn is toxic and covered with weed killer. Dahl has finished The Witches, one of his common tales of threat in an English paradise. This is a landscape Jews recognise – and Maschler does – but I have always believed that Dahl identified with Jews as much as he hated them, which is maybe why he hated them. He conforms to Sartre’s stereotype that you imagine in the Jew what you hate in yourself. Dahl was an outsider too, with a longing for a knighthood that never came. As Giant opens, he is delighting in Quentin Blake’s drawings for The Witches and whining about the illustrator’s royalties. These are the loves and grumbles of a child: as the critic Sam Leith writes in The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, “Dahl had an unerring sense of the basic and extravagant appetites of children, perhaps because his own inner child was so near the surface… He had a child’s id.”
But children don’t write on Israel-Palestine and Dahl is suffering under what he would not call an ongoing public relations crisis: Giant is just the latest blow. He has published a review of Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy’s God Cried, a book about the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, in which he writes that Jews are like Nazis. This idea, as Howard Jacobson says, is retrospective absolution for people who saw European Jewish civilisation meet its end: an attempt to process the Shoah, so we can sleep again. (It’s particularly grotesque from Dahl, an ace fighter pilot who admitted he enjoyed the war). The New York Times is planning a critical article, and American Jewish booksellers are refusing to sell his books. Maschler comes to Gypsy House to present Jessie Stone from the US sales department, to persuade Dahl to publicly apologise.
But Stone will not be bowed. She is a self-confident Jew: an American Jew. She tells Dahl his criticism of Israel’s behaviour is “mixed in with a stiff measure of something else”. Dahl’s insistence that he is anti-Israel, not anti-Jew, is self-deception, and the question implicitly asked of the non-Jewish audience is – you too? “I have an old friend,” Dahl says. “Colin is my Israel. Always punching people and blaming the barman.” Or: “Your ancient wounds you hawk like cheap linen.” He rants against, “A nasty little cabal of nasty fucking Jews.”
Dahl’s published remarks on Jews and Israel aside, Giant is fictional – Maschler and Liccy are real, Stone is not – but it is fair comment. Dahl’s unpublished Fifty Thousand Frogskins contains “sly, knowing” Jews; a character in Madame Rosette (1946) is “a filthy old Syrian Jewess”. In Sometime Never (1948) “a little pawnbroker in Hounsditch called Meatbein” hides in “the large safe in which he kept his money”. In 1990 he told the Independent: “I’ve become anti-Semitic… 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.” In 2020, Dahl’s family issued a partial apology for his anti-Semitism (the following year, they sold his back catalogue to Netflix for £500m). His words, they said, “stand in marked contrast to the man we knew”. Well, yes. You can’t be anti-Semitic to a non-Jew, and Dahl was very typical of a certain kind of anti-Semite. He was expert in loss. He lost his father and sister when he was three; his daughter Olivia died when she was seven; his son Theo was badly injured when a taxi hit his baby carriage; Patricia Neal had a stroke. If you suffer unreasonable tragedy, demons can be real to you. I think he needed them.
“You saved the Jew in Europe,” Stone says – untrue, the British did nothing of the sort – “only to find the Jews weren’t worth saving. That’s it? Heroes’ remorse? And now you want their devil state brought to its knees?” Then she says: “You don’t believe Israel should exist, do you?” That’s the urgent question – where does this end? – but, like many anti-Zionists, Dahl can’t face his own answer to it: a child again, he says he needs the toilet. Rosenblatt is wise to give Stone a touch of hysteria: her suggestion that The Witches – “a secret society of powerful, child-snatching, money-printing devils, posing as humans” – is an allegory of Jews is absurd. Even so, the theatre was charged. Rosenblatt shows how anti-Zionism can be anti-Semitism, and I wondered if anti-Zionists present asked themselves if, like Dahl, they might be both.
Even so, the character I find most interesting is Tom Maschler, who Elliot Levey plays with weary charm. He holds himself tightly with smiles and shrugs and fine linen. He spends most of the second act playing tennis in the drive, having hoped to escape for a match with Ian McEwan, and trying and failing not to get involved in the Dahl/Stone battle. Is Maschler the playwright’s voice? I think he is, and it is a perfect portrait of a certain kind of British Jew: the kind who refuses to be stereotyped, or to have his relationship to Israel, or Judaism, defined for him.
When Dahl says Jews live in Stamford Hill or Golders Green, Maschler mutters – almost to himself – “Kensington”. When Stone asks him where he would go if Britain was unsafe for Jews, he sighs, “Provence”. To Stone, he explains the peculiarity of English schoolboy anti-Semitism: “Mostly it’s boys finding good sticks to whack each other with. Not nice, but neither was my aunt’s wallpaper.”
Maschler embodies an unanswerable question: what is the English Jew? “I don’t pine for Jerusalem,” he says. “Don’t crave being in the majority. I prefer to live and work with people unlike me, you know? Not just prefer, need. The idea of shacking up with four million other Jews is… [he shudders]. Difference is the adventure.” When Dahl asks him who he is, he says: “Well, I suppose, in the end I’m… Tom Maschler.” To me, this line is the heart of the play. Maschler tells Dahl: “I wouldn’t be friends with someone who fundamentally hates me.” Typically, cruelly, Dahl says: “So we’re friends?”
This is a generous, pitiless piece. It has just enough comedy, and I sense Rosenblatt banging his head against Terence Rattigan. Don’t the English ever talk about anything? Maschler is alive to Dahl’s self-hatred, and his gift. When Liccy, who Rachael Stirling plays with ravenous niceness, dreams of his knighthood, Dahl says: “You want me proper? Like one of your lot?” He tries to appease Maschler with the line: “I’m barely English myself.” To Maschler, Rosenblatt gives a fine criticism of the point of Dahl’s work: “To show [the world’s] cruelty but take [the child] out the other side.” Dahl, though, was trapped in this cruel world, laying paths of escape only for children who, like Charlie Bucket, are worthy. To Stone, he gives as good a summary of Dahl as there is outside his own fiction: “You’re a belligerent, nasty child and these threats and cruelties… a child’s. It’s the gift of your work, but the curse of your life.” At the close Dahl does something so self-destructive I felt for him – it involves the interview with the New Statesman that destroyed his reputation – and perhaps Rosenblatt does too. In his acknowledgements, Rosenblatt thanks “my glorious little boys, the next generation of avid Roald readers”.
[See also: The National’s modern Coriolanus]
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