THE BIG RATHER UNFRIENDLY GIANT
Tom Maschler, legendary publisher and once a Kindertransport child, summed up the appeal of Roald Dahl: his stories offer “A glorious playful path through the chaos of childhood”. Dahl was a writer unafraid – like Grimm – to offer young readers a world containing both wickedness and resistance. But when a quarrelsome 1983 luncheon has run its course in this remarkable play another verdict comes from Jessie, the US publisher sent to try and talk him into apologizing – at least a bit – for floridly antisemitic remarks. Her final summing-up of him is ‘You’re a nasty, belligerent child!”
Mark Rosenblatt ‘s play, imagining such a meeting, reminds us that both have a point. Dahl has enchanted generations (though some of us shudder a bit at his caricatures of older women). He was a philanthropist at times, a gallant fighter pilot, a devoted and doubly grieving parent. Yet there is about him a quality which transford a wayward, angry, bullied, naturally impish child into a grumpy old curmudgeon with little temperate adulthood between. To have this quality captured here, memorably, in an extraordinary performance by John Lithgow is treat enough. But it’s even more of a stimulus to have the nature of such men’s appalling antisemitism skewered and defined in two hours of tense drama . Especially now, when that sickness is horribly reviving across Europe.
GIANT has only another week to run, a sellout from the start, and I come late to it for odd reasons. But since it has garnered 5* reviews and will undoubtedly transfer up West eventually, it feels worth joining the chorus of praise (and of necessary, topical unease) to remind any readers to go and see it. As I shall again, wherever it goes . Nicholas Hytner directs – a first time at the Court for the NT and Bridge veteran – and there’s never a false note.
Some fear that its scale – four people at lunch, plus a couple of others briefly appearing – means that the play can only ever suit a small theatre like the Court. I disagree: I think it could hit home across a far bigger one and have seen lesser plays and smaller casts do it. It needs a wider audience, certainly.
It’s set in 1983. Dahl (Lithgow) is looking over the illustrations for The Witches: irascible, just divorced, soothed by his new partner (Rachael Stirling) and his publisher (Elliot Levey wonderful as Maschler, whether standing apart trying not to bite his nails, or sitting in a resigned pose of near-defeat when Dahl starts baiting the Jewish New York publisher (Romola Garai). She is elegant and controlled until the old man gets effortlessly under her skin by asking whether she does the stuff with “the funny scrolls”, and making a distinction between someone being Jewish and being “aggressively Jewish”.
Her job is to point out that his remarks are endangering sales of the new book in America, and perhaps a boycott by librarians (Ah, he says ” Satan’s spinster army!” and we can’t help laughing) . She cites one Holocaust survivor bookseller who is concerned. Dahl just sneers that “the kinder of his shtetl” in New England will just have to settle for Helen Oxenbury. The two words clang on the stage like casually thrown daggers.
Well, you get the tone, and brilliantly done it is. Frissons of shock run through the theatre as Dahl takes on Jessie until she shakes with surprised horror and hunches into each angry riposte. Another kind of shock occurs as he turns on Maschler, jeeringly throwing the publisher’s friendship and admiration back on him to inflict real pain. Moments of softness- Jessie has a brain damaged son, as he once did, and he understands – swing suddenly to moments of real dangerous hatred. Even while he continues eating the housekeeper’s tasty sorbets . Stirling, as his partner, does her best to control him with both impatience and love, but it’ll never work. The sacred monster’s brief late moment of self-doubt evaporates, taking us into the final twists – two of them. The last one sparks both outraged laughter and then silence. .
He throws all the insults, not only at Israel but at all Jews – “hoarding your ancient wounds” and denying the suffering caused by Israeli warmaking. When Jessie points out that if he’s not careful some may interpret the Witches as Jewish (hook nosed, cultish, tormenting children and amassing wealth) he suddenly gets really outraged : they were, he says, just versions of his grandmother. That’s clever of Rosenblatt, as it momentarily gives Dahl the authenticity of a creator misunderstood. But in no time he’s off again, the nasty belligerent child back among us.
You come out exhilarated, horrified, wiser, and better attuned to the terrible spectrum of this ancient irrational hatred: how subtle and genteel attittudes creep effortlessly up to pogrom level. You come out remembering the outrage of Jessie but also the real pain of Levey’s Tom Maschler. And yes, we do get that famous Dahl line “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” You come out thinking. That’s what its there for. Bravo.
Royalcourttheatre .com to 16 nov
rating 5, of course
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