A Faulty Attempt to Interrogate Roald Dahl on Stage

R oald Dahl has taken London by storm. At the same time that a musical based on his children’s book Matilda runs at the Cambridge Theatre in Covent Garden, Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant, a semi-factual account of Dahl in his later years, captivates audiences in sold-out showings at the Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square.

If the reception that Giant has met with is any indication, many people today would like to see the infamous author and provocateur answer a few pointed questions. A tiny cast and spartan, one-room setting are all that the play needs for its characters to engage in the retrospective interrogation to which theatergoers in 2024 wish they themselves could subject the often outrageous Dahl, who died in 1990. Unable to pose the questions to him directly, viewers get the next best thing.

One might commend Rosenblatt for taking up a controversial and difficult subject, while wondering why the play seems, at times, oddly selective in its presentation of Dahl’s work, themes, ideas, and views.

After its September 20 debut, Giant quickly sold out every matinee and evening showing in its two-month run. Given its explosive subject matter, the production might well have sold out without exemplary acting, writing, and direction. Add those, plus timely questions about how far Israel can or should go to defend itself, and you’re in for a memorable experience.

John Lithgow, who spent a good part of the late 1960s watching plays at the Royal Court and growing infatuated with theater, does not play so much as resurrect Roald Dahl. Watching him growl, lurch, and lumber around the stage with his huge frame and mad-scientist hair, I had trouble believing this was once the prim, slender young man I first saw on-screen in 1983’s nuclear doomsday shocker The Day After.

The play is set over a couple of days in 1983, shortly before the publication of The Witches,  a children’s book by Dahl, and not long after the appearance of a book review he wrote, for the Literary Review, of Tony Clifton’s God Cried. In the review, Dahl set forth harsh, not to say scurrilous, criticisms of Israel for its invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, and for its subsequent actions.

Along with Lithgow, the cast of Giant includes Rachael Stirling as Felicity Crosland, Dahl’s former mistress and current fiancée; Elliot Levey as Tom Maschler, Dahl’s U.K. publisher and a founder of the Booker Prize; Romola Garai as Jessie Stone, an employee of Farrar, Straus and Giroux who comes out to Dahl’s U.K. home to plead with him to try to mend his divisive public image, for the sake of his literary reputation no less than for that of his publishers’ bottom lines; and, in smaller roles, Tessa Bonham Jones as a helper, Hallie, and Richard Hope as Dahl’s friend Wally Saunders.

Stone is not eager to raise the touchy subject, but it soon grows clear that Dahl’s U.S. publishers have watched his public antics, not to mention his vocal hostility to Israel, with growing alarm. Few things could sabotage the release of The Witches as effectively as a PR nightmare in which the public recoils from what it believes, not without reason, to be the sort of argumentation that antisemites or, as they sometimes call themselves today, anti-Zionists, resort to: dubious relativism and false equivalencies that equate self-defense on Israel’s part with the atrocities of the last century’s dictators.

The play dwells on the irony that Maschler, who is Jewish, does not seem nearly as troubled as Stone is about Dahl’s offensive statements in the review or about his boorish utterances. She responds with evasions to her host’s off-putting (indeed grating) questions about whether she herself is Jewish. Lithgow’s Dahl rarely seems to think before he speaks or to have much concern for how his words affect others. If you want the answer to a question, you ask it, and if others have thin skins, that is no one’s problem but theirs.

Rosenblatt adds a number of well-chosen period details, such as Maschler’s mentioning a tennis match he is soon to enter with the author Ian McEwan, who even in 1983 had a reputation for his macabre short stories and novellas. (Maschler: “If he plays as well as he writes, I’m f****d.”) Another character alludes to Paul Johnson’s scathing rebuttal of what Dahl wrote about Jews and Israel. Yet, in countless ways, the play belongs to 2024 as much as to 1983.

Why does Giant feel so topical? It takes a fresh look at controversies involving a writer it sometimes seems nearly everyone has strong opinions about. The more time passes, the bigger the fires grow. (Early in 2023, the story broke that Puffin, the U.K. children’s imprint of Penguin Books, had hired “inclusion ambassadors” to rewrite passages in Dahl texts to bring them into line with the enlightened views of the present. There must be no references to women working as cashiers, for example. They must be top scientists or heads of companies.)

In a play set decades before “cancel culture” became a household term, Rosenblatt’s characters spar over the limits of acceptable speech and whether an author should moderate his public-facing self to avoid rocking the boat and jeopardizing sales. Then there are Dahl’s references, in his review and his sparring with others onstage, to incidents all too familiar to us in the present. The firing of rockets at hospitals, the killing and maiming of children, refugees, starvation, and death.

The actual Dahl did write the review we hear portions of read aloud in Giant. Some of the things he says there, dealing freely in generalizations and collective guilt, may make your hair stand on end. (Among the offensive statements: “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”)

In a short essay included in the program, Rosenblatt maintains that Dahl also responded with vituperation and bigotry to reporters who called him at his home. Yet in parts of the play, Rosenblatt seems to have adopted Aaron Sorkin’s stance that it is fine to fudge the facts in the interest of a story.

If Jessie Stone feels at times like a device rather than a real person, it’s because she is precisely that. No such person visited Dahl at his home. Stone is the fictional agent of the retrospective grilling to which some would like to subject Dahl, a writer with abundant talent and a dubious moral compass. She bluntly states her belief in Israel’s right to exist, indeed to assert that right through force if and when necessary, and appears shocked at Dahl’s frank questions. Yet Garai’s delivery and timing are so skillful that you don’t really think about the use of such an artifice as you watch the play.

Indeed, so skilled an actor is Garai that she seems the furthest thing from a cable host asking questions from a position of moral and intellectual superiority. Yet her arguments with Dahl still seem a bit like contrivances by which she tries, in a tin-eared fashion, to elicit from the famous author answers to the questions that trouble contemporary readers, critics, educators, and parents. It is as though, in a play about Hemingway, a character faces him and demands, “With all due respect for your undisputed talent, sir, should you be waxing poetic about war in a century where millions are dying from it?”

For some viewers, the play may suffer from a lack of biographical and historical context. The Dahl we meet here could practically be a member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union of British Fascists. Surely no discussion of the question of Dahl’s views on the Jewish people and their persecution should omit all mention of the fact that he was both a willing Royal Air Force pilot and a skilled diplomat working behind the scenes to preserve the special relationship between the two liberal great powers, the United Kingdom and the United States, that were most instrumental to ridding the world of fascism.

As Matthew Dennison notes in his 2023 biography, Dahl asked the RAF to make him a pilot and greatly enjoyed flying until, on a flight in a Gloster Gladiator out of Fouka in Egypt, the plane’s undercarriage hit a boulder and he had to crash-land in the desert. After a slow, painful recovery, Dahl’s superiors declared him fit for service again in February 1941. Both Felicity and his sister Else, Dennison reminds us, would later attest to his eagerness to resume serving his squadron. As a Mark I Hurricane pilot, Dahl shot down Luftwaffe and Vichy French planes over Greece and British Palestine, respectively. It is not a shameful record at all. If Dahl liked his subsequent role as an assistant air attaché based in Washington slightly less than his RAF service, it was only because, as Dennison writes, “he had delighted in belonging to a fraternity bonded by purpose and shared risks, and his airborne autonomy.”

So, to answer the question that fixates London audiences: It is clearly not time to cancel Roald Dahl, a war hero in the great and necessary struggle against fascism. Mark Rosenblatt’s brilliant play does itself and the public a disservice through its shoehorning of the complexities of Dahl’s life into a scenario where a made-up character interrogates a controversial author.