“Giant” Takes on Roald Dahl and His Antisemitism
Novelists never get to see readers applaud their works—or walk out of them—but playwrights do. The dramatist’s encounter with the audience, whether disappointing or exhilarating, is a unique, indelible experience. This thought occurred to me last August, as the director and playwright Mark Rosenblatt and I hightailed it from a restaurant in London’s Soho, down the red-lanterned alleys of Chinatown and through the blinking neon hubbub of Leicester Square, to the Harold Pinter Theatre, in order to second-act the penultimate night of Rosenblatt’s West End hit, “Giant.”
The play is a study of Roald Dahl, one of England’s most celebrated children’s authors (three hundred million copies of his books have been sold worldwide), and the scandal he caused, in 1983, by making antisemitic statements in a review of a book about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The way that “Giant” gathered momentum was almost surreal: first, there was the involvement of such theatre greats as Nicholas Hytner (the former artistic director of the National Theatre and a co-founder of London’s Bridge Theatre), the actor John Lithgow, who plays Dahl, and the set and costume designer Bob Crowley; then a première at the legendary Royal Court, in 2024, where “Giant” was, according to the theatre’s artistic director, David Byrne, one of the best-selling shows in its seventy-year history; three Olivier Awards, including Best New Play; and the West End run at the Harold Pinter, where “Giant” sold out every show for fourteen weeks. Productions were already under way in Riga, Barcelona, and Madrid, but the biggest skip of the theatrical stone was to New York, where “Giant” will open at the Music Box, on Broadway, on March 23rd.
Rosenblatt, a boyish forty-eight-year-old who spent the first twenty years of his career as a jobbing theatre director, seems to view these successes with a stunned, somewhat wary delight. A nimble soccer player—“a legend in his own lunchtime,” as the Brits say—he is swift of foot as well as of mind; we made it to the theatre with time to spare. We stood catty-corner to the crowd that had gathered, during the intermission, under the glow of the marquee and its image of Lithgow looking eerily similar to the rangy Dahl. As the audience began to flow back into the theatre for the second act, Rosenblatt remarked, “I have a poster on my wall, from years and years ago, which says ‘Zero Commercial Potential.’ ”
“Was it up when you were writing the play?” I asked.
“It was in my eye line,” he said.
At the entrance, an attendant asked to see our tickets. “I’m the author,” Rosenblatt said. His words didn’t seem to register. He added, “The playwright. I wrote the play. I’m just going to listen from the back.”
The attendant’s brow furrowed. “Come with me,” he said. We followed as he forged a path through the throng until he spotted the house manager. “He says he wrote the play,” the attendant said, nodding in our direction. The manager smiled at us over the attendant’s shoulder and waved us in.
We entered at the foot of the proscenium. “Too close, too overwhelming,” Rosenblatt said, moving up the aisle toward the ochre curtains at the back of the stalls, his preferred spot. The lights dimmed. The audience drew itself to attention. Rosenblatt whispered, “The beginning of Act II is quite fun. There are a couple of good jokes. So, when I’m back here, I can feel how lively the show’s been tonight.” What distinguished this night’s audience was the particular quality of its focus. There was no restlessness, no coughing. The audience was braced, ready to listen.
The play imagines the arrival at Dahl’s Buckinghamshire home of Tom Maschler and Jessie Stone, emissaries from Dahl’s English and American publishing houses, both of whom are Jewish, soon after the publication of his antisemitic review and just prior to the launch of his novel “The Witches.” To the publishers, who have made a big investment in Dahl, the visit is an exercise in disaster management. To Dahl, it’s an opportunity to poke the bear. To the audience, the ensuing debate works as a kind of Roman candle, the play’s lacerating wit shooting sparks of light over an array of divisive issues that are hard, in these heartbreaking days, to speak or hear about—Palestine and Israel, Jewish identity, political correctness, antisemitism, malignant narcissism. Rosenblatt’s script trades in paradox, not polemics; it is at once uncomfortable and thrilling. Among “Giant” ’s many astonishments—of thought, characterization, construction—the most surprising, perhaps, is that it is the first play that Rosenblatt ever wrote.
Rosenblatt paced. Act II begins with the offstage sound of a toilet flushing. Dahl, who suffered from lifelong back pain after crashing his plane as an R.A.F. fighter pilot in the Second World War, enters. “Narrow escape. . . . Battle adrenaline meant I held it in,” he says, and then proceeds to dump on the other characters with withering ironies. Beyond the physical resemblance, Lithgow conveys Dahl’s soigné swagger, the shellac of his English public-school privilege. Dahl, like his fictional witches, is “dangerous because he doesn’t look dangerous.” Although his fiancée, Felicity Crosland, or Liccy, begs him not to, Dahl draws his jejune young housekeeper, Hallie, into his mess. He asks if her upcoming holiday includes a visit to Israel:
The audience roared. I looked over at Rosenblatt, who was still patrolling the back wall. “There was actually a laugh there I hadn’t heard before,” he whispered. “It was on ‘Simple question.’ The audience realized it wasn’t a simple question, and they laughed. The audience was very alive to it.”
Rosenblatt’s first foray into theatre was as a sock in a school production of Beatrix Potter’s “Tailor of Gloucester.” By his own admission, he was a teen-age “theatre nerd,” his bedroom walls decorated with production posters, his hangout the National Theatre. “I was a terrible showoff as an actor,” he said. “I liked the tightrope that actors walked, the possibility that the illusion would crack.” Rosenblatt’s parents, Harvey and Linda, both pillars of North London’s Jewish community, saw theatre as a “worrisome prospect,” he said. “My dad didn’t go to university. He just wanted me to make the most of my privileged education.” But, as his parents nudged him toward the Inns of Court, Rosenblatt gravitated toward the boards.
The actor Rory Kinnear performed with Rosenblatt at St. Paul’s School, one of London’s most expensive private institutions, and was directed by him when they were undergrads together at Oxford. “Mark was a slightly more thrusting young buck in those days,” Kinnear recalled. “Very, very determined with his directing, to the extent that you thought, Calm down, mate. We’re only seventeen.” At St. Paul’s, Rosenblatt and Kinnear co-starred in a staging of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glenn Ross”—Rosenblatt as Shelley (the Machine) Levene, an aging real-estate salesman, and Kinnear as Ricky Roma, his cutthroat competitor. Kinnear remembers thinking how good Rosenblatt was. “It was sort of a surprise he gave up acting so quickly, by the time he got to university,” Kinnear said.
“There’s more dimension to being a director,” Rosenblatt told me. “You can create the whole thing, rather than just being in it.” In the course of three years at Oxford, he staged Joe Orton’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloane,” Joshua Sobol’s “Ghetto,” Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” Frank McGuinness’s “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me,” and a production of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” that toured Japan. In Japan, Rosenblatt had a chance to act again. “One of the chaps who played Baptista detached a retina when we were about to play Kobe University,” Kinnear, who was Petruchio, opposite Rosamund Pike’s Bianca, told me. “Mark very bravely stepped into his considerably larger shoes and larger suit on four hours’ notice. The sight of Mark emerging onstage with these trousers sweeping the floor before him and the cuffs of his jacket sort of brushing his knees—I ended up just beating the floor with laughter! Kobe University wrote us that we would not be welcomed back. I blame it squarely on Mark’s long suit.”
The glow of Oxford’s spotlight followed Rosenblatt into professional theatre, and he was championed early on by adventurous elders. Thelma Holt, then a visiting professor of theatre at Oxford, got him his first job, assisting John Crowley in a production of “Macbeth.” Dominic Dromgoole, then director of the Oxford Stage Company, took Rosenblatt under his wing, as an assistant director. “He was a terrible assistant. He would sit behind me and roll his eyes when I spoke,” Dromgoole said. “It was done with such a lightness and sense of fun that you forgave him.” In 1999, Rosenblatt won the James Menzies-Kitchin Young Director Award. Ultimately, though, he didn’t quite achieve the liftoff that his early years had promised. “Some directors, at the time in their careers when they need to demonstrate to themselves and to others what they can do, don’t get the right opportunities,” Hytner told me. “It’s that simple. Mark’s career was a good career but not a stellar career.”
In 2013, Rosenblatt became the associate director of the Leeds Playhouse, where he put on nine main-stage productions by playwrights ranging from Chekhov to Alan Bennett. Rosenblatt judged the experience “wonderful” but found the system frustrating. “You were choosing plays that would contribute to the bottom line, that weren’t as idiosyncratic as I’d have liked,” he said. “Sometimes a show ran for a shorter time than the rehearsal period. Things just weren’t adding up. Something needed to change.”
The urge to write had been percolating since August 22, 2009, when Rosenblatt spoke at the wedding of his best friend, Alex Gallafent. “I made everyone laugh a lot,” he said. “It gave me such a thrill, somehow, weaving a story of my friendship and what I wished for them. It unlocked a feeling that I could write and hold the attention of a group of people.” He’d already written a few film adaptations—including W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Circle”—but those were baby steps on a path he was afraid to take. “I was always not writing,” he said. “When you’re adapting, you’re editing and shifting. The tracks have already been laid down, so the risk is limited. I had to write something original. It was a real terror.”
If Rosenblatt was to do original work, he felt, it would have to draw “from what I knew, had lived.” His outlook, he explained, had been informed by a serious “engagement with what my family went through in the war.” His first intimation of an unspoken grief in the family story occurred when he was about ten, in the bright, well-upholstered front room of his home, in St. John’s Wood. Rosenblatt and his family were taking tea with Auntie Ica, an “elderly cousin-type person,” when she rolled up her sleeve, revealing an Auschwitz tattoo. “There, in the context of lace curtains, milk and biscuits, and ‘Who wants sugar?’—it was shocking,” Rosenblatt said. Years later, the family uncovered a photo of Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, picking people for his medical experiments from a lineup at Auschwitz. “Auntie Ica was in the lineup,” Rosenblatt told me, adding, “You absorb this stuff. It’s major.”
In 2022, on “Holocaust: Three Generations,” a podcast about inherited trauma, Rosenblatt’s mother, Linda, spoke of how important it was for every Jewish child to keep the Shoah in mind. She had become the family’s archivist and historian, producing a family tree detailing the births, the deaths, and the burial locations of her exterminated relatives. Linda also reconstructed the story of her mother’s flight from the Nazis—a terrifying, epic journey that took her from Frankfurt to Antwerp to Toulouse to Nice to St.-Martin-Vésubie, and, after a two-day trek in clogs over the French Alps with a thousand other Jews, to Turin, and then to Rome, where she sheltered in a convent until the end of the war. At nineteen, Rosenblatt visited the convent. Thirteen years later, with his parents and his younger brother, Jonathan, he followed his grandmother’s Alpine escape route into Italy, a steep, difficult climb, at an altitude above eight thousand feet. Her story, he said, “got into my dreams. I remember having persecution nightmares, being chased endlessly. I found it hard to imagine—the immediacy of being in a world that wanted you gone.”
In the late twenty-tens, Britain’s escalating debate about Israel and Palestine exposed the Labour Party’s gross mishandling of internal antisemitism, which led to breaches of the Equality Act. The issue was roiling the country, and the political argument was blurred with “terrible assumptions about Jews,” Rosenblatt said. In 2018, he married the writer and journalist Amy Abrahams, and by the end of the year they were expecting their first child. Rosenblatt’s family trauma resurfaced. “You sort of reconnect with the horror of it all when you’re a parent,” Rosenblatt said. “I didn’t want my son to be full of fear.” In the course of a weekend, he wrote the script for a short film titled “Ganef,” a nuanced fourteen-minute examination of trauma’s divisive damage, which he directed and produced independently. The character at the center of the short, which was long-listed for an Academy Award, was loosely based on stories from his grandmother. “She was afraid of travelling alone in taxis, of people in uniform,” he said. “She felt unsafe. She didn’t trust people. She didn’t want anyone to know what she was up to.”
In the film, a lively little girl, Ruthie, is playing a chasing game with the family maid, racing happily around the furniture of her elegant house, when her mother returns home with some purchases. “Take these up to my room,” the mother whispers to Ruthie. “Don’t let anyone see.” Later, sitting in her mother’s bedroom, Ruthie asks, “Why can’t people see the bags?” Her mother explains, “You know, when I was little. In Frankfurt. The people who hurt us. One soldier . . . a . . . a ganef—a thief—came to our home and he took what we had. But, if he didn’t know what we had, he couldn’t take it.” Ruthie asks, “Is a ganef coming here?” “No, no, no,” her mother tells her, and sends her off to play. But, psychologically speaking, the ganef has just arrived. The mother has planted the seeds of trauma in her daughter’s mind, contaminating her imagination.
By degrees, Ruthie loses her faith in the world. First, she hides her toys, then she wrongly accuses the maid of stealing an ashtray, thereby destroying their loving relationship. Although the mother apologizes to the maid, Ruthie is now consumed by fear, her reality violently distorted. When she later sees the maid trying on her mother’s coat, she bolts into her bedroom wardrobe and locks herself inside. “Go away, thief!” she calls, when the maid knocks on the door. The film ends with the spooked child trapped in cavernous darkness, breathing heavily. “Her refuge, the cupboard, is also a kind of prison of anxiety and mistrust,” Rosenblatt said. “That’s what prejudice does. It offers a mirage of clarity but, in fact, makes your world darker and smaller.”
Darkness and trauma, the complex connections between loss and cruelty that “Ganef” delivers in cinematic shorthand, were also what Rosenblatt discovered when he began to research Roald Dahl. As a boy, Rosenblatt said, “I adored him. He was the wallpaper of my childhood.” Now, as he tried to parse his anger at the Labour Party and to separate the debate about Israel and Palestine from what he called a “weaponized argument with terrible, racist assumptions,” it occurred to him that “there might be a way to dramatize that.” He remembered that Dahl had been caught up in an antisemitism scandal. He read the article that Dahl had written, for the Literary Review, about Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy’s “God Cried,” a pro-Palestinian account of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, in an attempt to dismantle the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s operational bases in the south. (The two-month siege of Beirut that followed led to thousands of Lebanese civilian deaths.) Dahl accused the Jews of switching “rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers” and decried “American Jewish bankers” and “Jewish financial institutions,” while calling on Jews “to follow the example of the Germans and become anti-Israeli.” The review, Rosenblatt said, “was written by a man who was very angry about Israel’s actions in Lebanon and very moved by the carnage in West Beirut. Also, there seemed to be a lot of racist, medieval antisemitic stereotyping going on.” Then he read about the backlash against Dahl. “It was firing me up, this idea,” he told me. “It had reach. I didn’t want to create something that was insular, where Jewish characters talk to Jewish characters for a Jewish audience only. I wanted to find a wide and diverse audience. With Dahl, we could come into the story through someone we thought we knew, whom we had an investment in.”
In late November, 2018, having just finished writing “Ganef,” Rosenblatt met up with Hytner for a coffee. “I was hoping that, if Nick liked the idea, the Bridge might commission, develop, even produce the play,” he said. He pitched the story as a “crisis-management dilemma.” Hytner lit up at the premise. “The really key idea was: Dahl wrote this book review,” Hytner told me. “People around him tried to get him to retract it. But he didn’t. He doubled down. So what Mark had was a beginning and an end.”
What Rosenblatt didn’t have was a writer. He asked Hytner for suggestions. “Mark didn’t have the play worked out, but he had far too much to go to an already established, top-tier playwright and say, ‘Write this play,’ exactly the play that you as a director want,” Hytner told me. “That’s not the way it works.” And, in the brio of Rosenblatt’s pitch, Hytner had heard something else. “Why don’t you write it?” he asked.
The idea of writing a play scared Rosenblatt: “All that yakking! And the fear of clunky exposition and being confined, essentially, for two hours in one locked-off wide shot. Perhaps that fear was also connected to a fear of being boring—a fear that somehow the kinetic syntax of film enabled me to keep an audience’s attention far more comfortably than a play would.” Nonetheless, he left his meeting with Hytner without having rejected the notion. “I guess, unconsciously, I must have thought there was a whiff of a possibility of my being able to do it,” he said. Hytner’s enthusiasm, he added, “helped short-circuit my usual self-doubt and impostor syndrome.”
Rosenblatt didn’t exactly hop to it; 2019 was a hectic year for him. He shot and edited “Ganef,” became a father, co-directed Brad Birch’s “Missing People,” and fought a losing battle with a feature-film script. It was calamity that finally got him down to work. “Missing People,” a play about a Leeds family that travels to Japan—a bilingual co-production five years in the planning—transferred from a Japanese theatre to Leeds in March, 2020. “We had achieved something amazing by the time the production came back to Leeds,” Rosenblatt said. An hour before the show’s press-night performance was to begin, it was cancelled. The date was March 16th—the day that theatres started to close in advance of COVID-19 lockdown. It was a sensational piece of bad luck.
At the time, Rosenblatt and his family were living in a two-room flat in Swiss Cottage, London. “The baby was sleeping in the living room, and there was no room to write,” he recalled. In the bedroom, he set up two pillars of books and placed a slab of wood across them. Sitting on the bed, at this wobbly, improvised desk, he said, “I sort of gently lowered myself into the scaldingly hot bath of writing a play.”
Rosenblatt prepared the way an actor prepares—trying forensically to get under the skin of “an extraordinary, cruel, troubled man.” He read biographies, interviewed Dahl’s acquaintances, and, to learn Dahl’s metabolism and his club-room badinage, studied videos of him on YouTube.
When Dahl sat down to dream up a story—in a cramped, unheated writing hut at the bottom of his garden—his gift was his ability not only to remember what it was like to be a child but to become a child. “It’s not like he was remembering a stable, sweet, bucolic childhood,” Rosenblatt said. “He was remembering the fierceness of it.” “Giant” opens with Dahl looking over proofs of “The Witches” and cheering the extra touches of grotesqueness that the book’s illustrator, Quentin Blake, has added. “Much nastier. Blistering scalps, clawed fingers. Good,” he says. “Relishing the bloodlust to come.”
The viciousness and violence in Dahl’s macabre tales appeal to young readers because they understand these things—subliminally, at least—as honesty. “The world is a rough old place,” Rosenblatt said. “Kids can behave badly. Adults can behave badly. Dahl voices some of the more gruesome, naughty, ugly, and mischievous thoughts kids have, and he says it’s O.K. to have them.” From the start, Rosenblatt was determined not to just “smash the Roald Dahl piñata” but to understand where his “casually contemptuous antisemitism” originated. “By seeing Dahl as a nuanced, complex, contradictory person,” he wrote in his treatment for the play, “I’m refusing to reduce him to the level of bogeyman.” To show brilliance, it is said, you need shadow; “Giant” brings Dahl’s shadow into the light.
In Rosenblatt’s script and Lithgow’s dazzling performance, Dahl is a kind of dervish of disdain, who projects his repressed fury onto others. In his books, Dahl’s monsters turn misery into fun; in life, his fun was to impose misery on others. The racist jibes that Dahl directs at his publishers in “Giant” perform the same annihilating voodoo as the spells in “The Witches”: to “squish them and squiggle them and make them disappear.” When he asks Jessie Stone, for instance, to explain her position on Israel, she confidently presents herself as a progressive Jew, “able to see Israel’s mistakes and flaws.” Smiling, Dahl says that this reminds him of his old friend Colin: “Colin is my Israel, I suppose. Always punching people and blaming the barman.”
The virulence of Dahl’s antisemitism was perhaps triggered in part by what he saw as Jewish self-righteousness, as Jews positioning themselves on the avant-garde of suffering. “Your ancient wounds you hawk like cheap linen,” he says in the play. His own ancient wounds were masked by his spikiness. At three, Dahl lost both his father and his eldest sister, to pneumonia and to appendicitis, respectively. At eight, he was sent to a boarding school where he was regularly beaten—“days of horror,” he called that time. Horror found him again in adulthood. He lost his eldest daughter, Olivia, to measles; his son, Theo, developed hydrocephalus at four months, after his pram was hit by a taxi. His first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms that left her, for a long time, unable to speak or walk.
“Giant” makes only one mention of Neal and includes a handful of terse, well-placed sentences about Dahl’s children. Nonetheless, according to the stage directions, he moves “through a cacophony of pain.” “No one else understands,” he says of having a disabled child. “Like stepping into a new world, over a line you didn’t know existed.” Dahl’s internal turbulence is manifested first in the unmooring atmosphere of Bob Crowley’s brilliant set—the gutted living room of Dahl’s house, which is in the process of being renovated to accommodate his new life with Liccy, who was his mistress for eleven years before becoming his fiancée. The space is frenetic and punishing. “Apocalyptic,” Dahl calls it.
In delineating this discombobulating landscape, Rosenblatt showed an instinctive sure hand; his route to his characters was more circuitous. In his original draft, he imagined Dahl’s two actual publishers, “the whizzy Tom Maschler,” of Jonathan Cape, in London, joined by Robert Gottlieb, then the editorial swami of Knopf, in New York. Gottlieb famously fired Dahl, his best-selling children’s author, for what he described in his pink slip as a “prolonged tantrum” that was “unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility.” Only after Rosenblatt had begun to write in earnest did he realize that Gottlieb had terminated Dahl two years before the events of the play. “I thought, Hang on, let’s see what happens if it’s a woman and it’s a lower-ranking member of staff,” Rosenblatt said.
Rosenblatt’s original plan for the play had been to show the publishers fighting to keep Dahl’s reputation and their profits from going down the plughole in the first act. The second act would be set at a tea party with a Jewish girl and her mother, hosted by Dahl and Liccy, as a misguided P.R. exercise. After eighteen months of writing, however, Rosenblatt realized that the scenes with the publishers were too much for one act to contain. Understanding that was, he said, “a great moment, but painful at the same time, as I had no plot.” Once this became clear, so did his rookie mistake. In Rosenblatt’s first draft, Dahl doubled down on his antisemitism offstage. In this new version, Rosenblatt realized, Dahl’s refusal to repent had to happen in front of the audience, and at the end of the play.
“I’m quite upbeat, but I’m very hard on myself,” Rosenblatt told me. He debated every line of the script with his wife at the kitchen table. “He read it to me, playing all the parts. I’d say, ‘Send it to me, and let me read it,’ ” Abrahams recalled.
On December 12, 2022, Rosenblatt sent Hytner a twenty-five-thousand-word draft. “Can’t wait to hear your thoughts,” he wrote. Hytner’s first thought was, Oh, Jesus, I’ve made this poor guy write this play. I haven’t even paid him for it. What if it’s no good? Then he sat down to read it.
“I had no idea that he could write such great dialogue,” Hytner said. “There are a lot of superintelligent, perceptive theatre writers who don’t have the ear. He has the ear.” He added, “I’ll tell you what was holding Mark back. He should have been a writer all along. He didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. But that’s plainly what he needed to be.” Hytner called Rosenblatt. He said that he wanted to direct “Giant” and asked what Rosenblatt thought about John Lithgow playing Dahl. “Lithgow’s wild imaginative energy—the same energy you assume drives Dahl’s wordplay and his genius for telling stories—is innate,” Hytner said. He sent the next draft of the script to Lithgow, with a warning: “It’s not for the faint-hearted.”
“Wow,” Lithgow replied the next day. “You’ve sent me a block of fine granite and there’s definitely a Michelangelo in there.”
Rosenblatt now lives in a gray, semidetached Victorian house on a somnolent road just off the hurly-burly of a North London high street. The ground floor has been more or less colonized by Rosenblatt and Abrahams’s sons, who are four and six. Almost every corner bulges with toys. But the playfulness of the parents is also visible. Given pride of place on a kitchen wall is a glass art work with the word “Mensch” etched in crimson and gold.
Rosenblatt’s writing shed, which he shares with Abrahams, is a lag putt across the garden’s sward of AstroTurf. Space is tight, with no room on the walls for the “Giant” poster that leans against his writing table. One day when I visited, he handed me a stapled stack of pages on which he had compiled a list of Dahl’s turns of phrase and coinages. “I used this kind of thing when I was researching,” he said. “They’re improvisations of a sort—‘pebbling,’ ‘squishius,’ ‘kittle.’ ” (The play’s original title was “Fantastic Nonsense.”)
In “Giant,” Dahl’s language is both teasing and toxic, and the unpredictable pitch and roll of Lithgow’s delivery make the verbal cracks both hard to see coming and very effective. Dahl’s sly colonial patter—“your people,” “your chaps”—allows his antisemitism to infiltrate a conversation in the guise of banter. But as “Giant” progresses and Dahl digs in his heels his name-calling gets heavier and uglier. At one point, for instance, he discovers Liccy and Tom talking one on one and suspects that they’re scheming. He quickly dubs his publisher Schmoozy:
Rosenblatt’s characters dance on a line. With all their professional and personal motives simmering below the surface, none of them can quite say what they feel until it becomes impossible to hold it in. “You’re a belligerent, nasty child,” Jessie finally spits. “It’s the gift of your work, but the curse of your life.” Dahl fires back, calling out what he sees as the hypocrisy in her sanctimony: “You sit here in my home, as my publishers, insisting I bow to a public clamour, utterly blind to how despicably racist you are yourself.” Their agile talk is encoded, a thrilling puzzle for the audience to decipher.
“Giant” anatomizes a certain kind of English racism within a traditional English form—the drawing-room drama. “I wouldn’t have been able to write this play if it had been more formally experimental,” Rosenblatt told me. “I loved working in closed space, closed time, almost real time, in a single room, fixed set, characters coming in and out in ways that require technical skill.” Crowley’s set—a large plastic sheet covers the back wall of the half-demolished living room, so that the outside is unseen but still present—mirrors Rosenblatt’s clever game of hide-and-seek, which observes the traditional rules of the genre but undermines, at every turn, its bourgeois punctilio. What Rosenblatt aimed to bring to the form, as he put it later, was “a sense of surprise—the familiar becoming distorted and strange.” Good manners are replaced with bad, reason with unreason, and the drawing-room drama’s comforting show of civility becomes an unsettling exhibition of cruelty: the lunch that is served up is a picnic on a precipice. The play ends with a sort of disgrace note, something the real Dahl, still defiant, said in an interview in The New Statesman: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Rosenblatt arrived for the first rehearsal of “Giant” in New York—at a dance studio a few blocks north of Union Square—as buoyant as the bright day. A blizzard had blown through the city a few days earlier, but the mounds of dimpled snow as high as a Shetland pony had been pushed to the curbs, and the city’s familiar din was returning. On arrival the night before, Rosenblatt had set off almost immediately, with two of the show’s producers, to see the pulsing green neon of the Music Box’s marquee. The billing was bigger on Broadway than in the West End, the street jazzier, and the stakes higher.
“I’ve only seen a couple of Broadway shows,” Rosenblatt said over a pre-rehearsal breakfast. “I don’t think I necessarily saw a route to Broadway through the work I was doing. It wasn’t like I was dreaming of it. Not at all.” When he was a director, musicals were not in his wheelhouse, and the huge financial hurdle of a Broadway production was beyond his imagining. “I’m just aware of how much work goes on behind the scenes—the level of dealmaking and the tenacity of the producers—to get these shows on a marquee,” he said. “You come to realize, when you go through the Stations of the Cross with a show, that you’re earning your right to be there.”
A few days later, as “Giant” was loading into the Music Box, I caught up with Rosenblatt there. It was the first time he’d been inside the theatre. Irving Berlin had the Music Box built in the nineteen-twenties, and “Giant” was joining a long list of distinguished productions mounted on this proscenium—Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” and Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming” among them. The theatre is exceptionally wide and shallow; on both levels of the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-seat auditorium, the audience is thrust close to the performers. What excited Rosenblatt, he said, was the dining table that had already been placed center stage. “There’s something very simple about this play. But its ideas were big enough to fill a West End house and even bigger theatres. The ideas and words, the intimate conversation that ricochets around this little wooden table—that’s amazing,” he said.
From the stage, Rosenblatt looked out and imagined a thousand New Yorkers staring back at the play. “What will they get from it? What will they laugh at? What point of view will they take?” he wondered. In the year and a half since “Giant” ’s début, the geopolitical situation has shifted, but Dahl’s story speaks as trenchantly to the current turbulent moment in the U.S.—and in the Middle East—as it did to Britain’s. “Giant” is an invitation for people to think for themselves, a rarity on Broadway. “The compulsion to be on the side of right, to be convinced of the correctness of your position and to destroy, humiliate, obliterate the person who doesn’t agree with you—I find that very prevalent,” Rosenblatt said. “The play destabilizes the idea of right and wrong. It allows an audience to sit with different possibilities and ambiguities.” He added, “Whether that becomes an obstacle for the show, I don’t know. But we’ll see. I mean, what are we gonna do? Call it off?” ♦