Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play Giant opened last year at London’s Royal Court Theatre to such critical acclaim that producers were falling over themselves to move it into the West End. This week its award-winning cast led by John Lithgow transferred the play into the capital’s Harold Pinter Theatre, garnering a further flurry of five-star reviews. But not from me.
Set in 1982, Giant is a fictional drama drawn from two documented spoutings of vitriolic antisemitism from the celebrated children’s author Roald Dahl. The first of these gobbets of bile came in a review that Dahl penned for the Literary Review on the book God Cried, written about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. Describing the actions of the Israeli armed forces, Dahl wickedly referred to “a race of people” who had “switched so rapidly from victims [in the Holocaust] to barbarous murderers”.
Amidst the outcry that followed the review Dahl was then to double down, saying in an interview with the New Statesman that “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them [the Jews] for no reason”. Dahl also lobbed a hideous lie into that interview, telling the magazine that Jews had not served in the British forces during World War Two.
The action of Giant occurs during the hiatus between the book review and the magazine interview, Rosenblatt’s play describing an imaginary meeting between the author and his publishers. Dahl’s The Witches is shortly to be published and the publishers are keen to play down the furore that the book review has stirred up. We meet Tom Maschler, the real-life head of the Jonathan Cape publishing house, together with the fictitious Jessie Stone from the New York publishing team. Both are Jewish with Maschler shown to be a deeply assimilated Brit, while Stone is more cherishing of her identity.
All three protagonists are well sketched out by Rosenblatt and while the play takes place long before the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) declaration was made – that included a definition of antisemitism as holding the Jewish people responsible for the actions of the Israeli state – Maschler, and Stone in particular, take Dahl to task over his book review, suggesting that the author retract his words and issue an apology. History shows that Dahl was to do no such thing. That Dahl was an antisemite is unquestioned, his family going so far as to offer a posthumous apology for his racist conduct as recently as 2020 and Rosenblatt’s translation of that antisemitism onto the stage is to be commended.
However, while Dahl is rightly held out to be an antisemite for the manner in which he expresses his criticism of Israel, those criticisms themselves are barely challenged in the play. The end of the first act sees Stone make a brief defence of Israel’s actions as a response to the hundreds of rockets that the PLO had fired across the border, but that is it.
Later in the second act, Rosenblatt creates a speech for Dahl, allowing the author to speak of the injuries suffered by a Lebanese child following an Israeli bombing raid, barely pausing for breath in the dialogue before conflating those grievous injuries with an appalling allegation of a devious Ashkenazi conspiracy that surrounded the very foundation of the Israeli state. And it is Rosenblatt whose script effectively allows those vile statements to remain unchallenged by the two Jews on stage. It is therefore hardly a surprise that the mainstream press, on reviewing Giant both last October at the Royal Court and last week in the West End, lauded the play as being “timely”.
Timely? Why timely? Has JK Rowling – perhaps the only current children’s author of similar standing to Dahl – suddenly spouted antisemitic filth that makes Giant timely? Of course not!
This perceived timeliness has arisen because the predominantly Israel-sceptic commentariat from London’s arts and theatre community and likely a large proportion of the show’s audiences, too, see a convenient parallel between Rosenblatt/Dahl’s description of Israel’s conduct in Lebanon in 1982 and the current conflict in Gaza. Unsurprisingly, not one of my colleagues in the world of theatre criticism has offered any explanatory context whatsoever as to their conflation of the play’s “timeliness”.
And thus Rosenblatt’s script proves a gift to Israel’s haters and for this he, quite possibly together with director Nicholas Hytner, bears a shameful responsibility. In much the same way as Roald Dahl was a gifted author, so Mark Rosenblatt is a talented playwright. Both men, however, carry differing degrees of malignancy in their writing.
