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.
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