Giant (Harold Pinter Theatre)

Verdict: Shock and awe

Rating:

Anyone familiar with Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s story The BFG will know that not all giants are Big and Friendly. Not least this enormously tall, hugely imaginative, massively successful giant of a writer.

In the course of Mark Rosenblatt’s bold, brilliant dramatic portrait of Dahl, he reveals him to be both less and more: a monstrously complicated, immensely flawed, childlike human being, paradoxically overflowing with infinite compassion and unrepentant hatred.

John Lithgow, in a transcendent performance that has won awards (and will doubtless win more) towers magnificently over proceedings as Dahl: initially witty and impish, but little by little growing into his true self — a gigantic bully as grotesque as one of his own creations.

The play’s setting is real. In 1983, Dahl wrote a blatantly antisemitic book review condemning the action of the Israeli forces on Beirut in 1982. Halfway into the piece, he says: ‘Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers.

’It proved incendiary, prompting death threats against the author and necessitating police protection outside the country house he shared with his fiancée, Liccy (played here by Rachael Stirling, sensible and Sloaney, expertly massaging his back and his ego).

The situation is an invention. His British publisher, Tom Maschler (a delightfully laid back Elliot Levey, an ‘anglicised’ Jew who cares more about sales than politics) and a representative of his U.S. publishers, Jessie Stone (American actress Aya Cash, passionate, appalled but politely defending the will of people of Israel from that of the Israeli government) arrive for lunch to ask him to apologise.

John Lithgow in GIANT at the Harold Pinter Theatre Giant by Rosenblatt

The play’s setting is real. In 1983, Dahl wrote a blatantly antisemitic book review condemning the action of the Israeli forces on Beirut in 1982

The play poses many questions, including that old one about whether art should be judged by the character of the artist.

Which was easy to answer until the moment when Dahl rings a journalist to discuss his review and casually comments: ‘Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.’ 

Over the course of two hours, Rosenblatt’s exposé of Dahl becomes a reflection of the unresolvable conflicts devastating our world today.

Funny, shocking, thought-provoking, controversial, superbly staged (Nick Hytner) and performed, this play is all that theatre should be. Essential viewing.

Giant runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 2.