Mark Rosenblatt’s ‘Giant’ concluded its run at the Royal Court on the weekend, a play focused on beloved children’s author and rabid antisemite Roald Dahl. The play takes place around Dahl’s dining room table in 1983 during the tricky period between the author making disparaging remarks about Jews in a book review and the release of The Witches. His wife and colleagues want him to apologise while he’d prefer to double down. Heated debates taking place during mealtimes? Dahl might have had more in common with us than he cared to admit.
The play is anchored by an astonishing performance from the peerless John Lithgow as Dahl. Tall and wiry, Lithgow has much more in common physiologically with Dahl than the last historical figure he portrayed, Winston Churchill. He brings something much more crucial to the role, however, and that is the acknowledgement that Dahl contained multitudes. He could be funny, charming and erudite in one moment but cruel and vindictive the next. This is a man, after all, who helped defeat the Nazis during his time as an RAF pilot who later went on the record with the words:
“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
There were audible gasps in the theatre when those words were uttered, a verbatim extract from an actual interview with the author. The part that has always troubled me most is the use of the word “stinker”. A writer as precise as Dahl tended to be meticulous in his word choice yet the noun he went for when describing the century’s greatest monster was one we’d more readily associate with a PG Wodehouse aunt.
Screenshot: Royal Court
Two Jews, three opinions or so they say and it should perhaps not be a surprise that the community has been split on what we should do with Matilda, The BFG, The Twits et al. A friend of mine came out of Giant and vowed to never again read a Dahl novel and yet in the play’s acknowledgements, Rosenblatt thanks “my glorious little boys, the next generation of avid Roald readers”.
Roald Dahl
It would be simpler if there were no traces of hatred within the work but part of Dahl’s appeal to children is his refusal to talk down to them. There is cruelty within the pages just as there is in life so, more often that not, it is there with good reason. If Miss Trunchbull isn’t terrifying, Matilda’s vengeance has less impact. Puffin Books announced last year they would be rewriting some of the more heinous sections in a move that was widely criticised. After all, it won’t start and end with Dahl and sooner or later it’ll be the turn of Shakespeare and Dickens.
And yet. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, adapted for the screen by Dahl, contains one of cinema’s most frightening villains in the form of the child catcher. The character’s top hat and large prosthetic nose are certainly choices and it is telling that the source material contains much fun involving a flying car but no hook-nosed caricature capturing kids with a net. That was clearly the one thing Dahl felt the original book was sorely lacking.
I still read Dahl’s novels to my children and not the expunged versions. My kids love Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, a film the author loathed because of his misgivings about Gene Wilder in the title role. Never mind the Hitler stuff, surely no opinion could be more of a red flag with regards Dahl and Jews than not rating Wilder as Wonka. If only he’d lived long enough to see the Tim Burton adaptation and witnessed what happened when noted gentile Johnny Depp had a stab at the role.
Giant does what great art should and asks difficult questions without providing easy answers. Rosenblatt’s feelings about his subject are clearly conflicted because Dahl was undeniably a man of contradictions and thus the play provokes debate. The author’s childish petulance made him an ideal writer of children’s fiction but a less than ideal man. The idea of boycotting his work might appeal to some but it has shades of Nazis burning books. And only a stinker like Hitler would approve of something like that.
- Darren Richman is a journalist
