In 1983, Roald Dahl was introducing his newest Farrar, Straus and Giroux confection, The Witches, about a coven of claw-handed women who thrive on turning children into mice. The new-volume-every-year author already had sold millions of books worldwide, and for the fall release season was expected to sell millions more.
Awkwardly, however, in August 1983, Dahl published a review of the book God Cried in Literary Review where he—already having a reported reputation as an antisemite—wrote of Jews: “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”
Worse, giving a follow-up interview in The New Statesman about many similar remarks that followed the above unmitigated one, he added, “[t]here’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Those sentiments and others just as damning had a predictable effect at FSG. Concerned that the controversy would damage sales, the executives, Roger Straus chief among them, decided the corrective strategy must be persuading the adamant, megaphone-voiced Dahl to issue—what he was most likely not to do—an apology.
And so, only a few years back, British theater director Mark Rosenblatt—aware of the scalding non-book Dahl chapter—decided to write his first play about it. Notably, he was encouraged by Nicholas Hytner, former London National Theatre artistic director and current Bridge Theatre co-founder, a man who famously never makes a wrong move and doesn’t here.
Now, carrying enough encomia with it to sink an Iranian battleship, Giant arrives. It’s a powerful wallop of a work with a performance by John Lithgow—who bears an eye-popping resemblance to the hulking, dogmatically cynical Dahl—that packs an equally reverberating wallop.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
What transpires throughout Giant—Dahl, an impaired giant constantly dealing with a painful back—is what would be expected: an unrelenting and timely study of one antisemite bent, like his metaphorical back, on championing antisemitism as it is rampantly on the rise. Or should it be said that today antisemitism is thriving as always, the United Kingdom not alone in the devastating practice? (The widespread abomination is only hinted at in Giant.)
Rosenblatt sets up his intensifying confrontation by freeing Dahl to unleash antisemitic bombshells on two Jewish characters. They’re Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), managing director of Roald’s British publisher and also an acceptable handler whom Dahl dubs the “house Jew,” and Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), an American sales manager supposedly dispatched directly from Manhattan to manipulate Dahl into changing his way-off-pitch tune.
Once Jessie arrives, she instantly becomes a handy target for the menacing Dahl, no matter how much Tom or Dahl’s fiancée Felicity “Liccy” Crosland (Rachael Stirling) try to shield her from the dogged attacker. Dahl wastes no time drilling her on whether she might be Jewish. When she says she is, he immediately wonders if the name Stone has been changed from Stein. Understanding she needs to protect herself, Jessie does her best but isn’t up to the effort. Who would be against a man whose toxic remarks are regularly coated with poisonous charm?
There you have playwright Rosenblatt’s premiere work, which he told John Lahr (in a New Yorker profile) that he was uncertain about taking on. His reticence: “All that yakking! And the fear of clunky exposition and being confined, essentially, for two hours in one locked-off wide shot.”
Rosenblatt assesses the challenge accurately. Giant has its own case of gigantism, of sustained talkiness. Dahl hurls his antisemitism tirades so often that the cumulative point lands more than sufficiently during the two acts. Eventually, they’re gratuitous. Actually, the truly stunning dramatic high point occurs only grim moments before an ominous first-act blackout. It’s achieved with one weaponized word (no spoiler coming) blasted at the increasingly assailed Jessie.
Thereby, the novice playwright ends his first act with second-act expectations at a low. What more might fire up than Dahl compulsively emitting additional Jesse-aimed antisemitisms that are met by more of Liccy and Tom attempting to calm the roiling verbal waters?
Were this a second or third Rosenblatt play, he might have matured enough to realize he could have accomplished his angry mission with a compact and more forcible 90-minute one-act. Granted, he does compose two forward-surging sequences. In one, he has Liccy tell Dahl she saw him smuggling out the Literary Review envelope, abashedly knowing it contained trouble. Rosenblatt also addresses the question of whether Dahl ever backs down on his egregious behavior, a decision that will not be described here.
What remains to be trumpeted about this nevertheless impressive import with its flawless cast (Stella Everett and David Manis, among them) is praise for set designer Bob Crowley. The recipient over the years of many awards, he does his magic again with a giant Giant set, a depiction of Gipsy House, Dahl’s family home in Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
The storied place is under renovation now that the former Dahl wife, actress Patricia Neal, has vacated and, after an 11-year affair, the devoted Liccy will finally be a bride. With the loft-like room’s upstage plastic curtain, packed boxes, exposed ceiling, and center-stage dining table, the space is also a sly symbol of Dahl’s abidingly stripped life.
One truth that can definitely be said about Giant is that it reconfirms that long-standing warning to ignore any urge we might have about meeting our heroes.
Giant opened March 23, 2026, at the Music Box Theatre and runs through June 28. Tickets and information: gianttheplay.com
