A ‘Giant’ Arrives on Broadway

There’s a giant rampaging on Broadway and, though big, it is decidedly not friendly. The creature is cantankerous, egotistical, hot-tempered, and frequently uses its acid tongue, especially when anyone tries to criticize it.

The big unfriendly giant in question is the protagonist of Mark Rosenblatt’s eponymous play about Roald Dahl. Set over a single day in the summer of 1983 at his home in Great Missenden, England, the action occurs shortly before the publication of Dahl’s children’s book The Witches. As portrayed by John Lithgow, the character is both literally tall and a titan in the world of letters, having sold three million copies of his books for young readers and having published macabre short stories fusing elements of Saki and the Brothers Grimm. In this intriguing, if slightly schizophrenic, play, Dahl’s hotheaded judgments and arguments with others raise Middle East issues as crucial today as they were in 1983, without quite exploring them in depth or properly incorporating historical facts hinted at in the course of those arguments.

The real Roald Dahl was certainly divisive and, though giving him credit for talent, the playwright has not erred on the side of tact or avoided rendering the author as a childish provocateur. As the play opens, Dahl has just published a piece in the Literary Review offering praise for the book God Cried by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy, which criticized Israel for collateral damage inflicted in the course of its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Rather than taking issue with individual political leaders or military commanders over that event, Dahl imputed collective guilt to the Jewish people, writing that never before had “a race of people” transitioned “so rapidly from victims to barbarous murderers.” He also made insinuations about the allegedly outsized role of “the great Jewish financial institutions” in forestalling U.S. opposition to Israel’s actions.

Those are hideous, and from the point of view of Dahl’s publishers, potentially commercially catastrophic things to say in public. Nothing could hurt sales of The Witches quite like a public backlash against an antisemitic author. So Dahl’s U.S. publisher, Farrar Straus, dispatches Jessie Stone (Aya Cash) to the author’s home in England, where he lives with his fiancée Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling) and his maid Hallie (Stella Everett). The publishers’ hope, we are told, is that Stone can prevail on Dahl to retract or apologize for his more inflammatory comments before the book’s publication, thus salvaging something of his public image.

It does not take long for Dahl to provoke Stone into arguments about the justness of Israel’s actions or the distinction between the Israeli state and the Jewish people. In one impassioned monologue, she rightly points out that Dahl forgets all context and acts as if Israel pursued its military actions out of malice. Stone is right, of course, but Dahl resents a stranger less than half his age telling him that his moral compass is off and he has no grasp of the dynamics of the Middle East conflict. He responds testily, citing an account of a young athlete in Beirut maimed for life when a hunk of concrete, blown off by an Israeli air raid, severed part of his leg. Dahl even goes so far as to dictate a biting, sarcastic letter, full of antisemitic tropes, that he wants Stone to take back to her boss in New York.

Why doesn’t Dahl just kick Stone right out of his house? As becomes clear, the ranting bigot we see onstage has a loving side. Rosenblatt’s dialogue suggests a deep affinity on Dahl’s part for kids in general and vulnerable kids especially. He is perceptive, too, and intuits that there is something the matter with Stone’s son, who is a fan of Dahl, for her to read books to him at the age of 15. And, indeed, he is right, the son had been deeply damaged by a brain tumor. For his part, Dahl lost his daughter, Olivia, to measles when she was just seven, and has also had to deal with lasting complications from a traffic accident that nearly killed his tiny son Theo. Their viewpoints may be polar opposites, but Dahl and Stone have both gone through a parent’s direst nightmare and Lithgow shows Dahl in the throes of that solidarity.

Stone is not the only visitor at the Dahl residence. She is the junior support to Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), a Holocaust survivor as a child and now Dahl’s British publisher. Taken aback by Dahl’s approach, she gives an articulate, heartfelt speech about her feelings, but for Maschler, her opinion is quite beside the point, her strategies for getting Dahl to apologize are biting the hand that feeds, or, more literally, running the risk of alienating Dahl and losing millions of sales. Stone is a bumbling, self-important do-gooder. Showing up an hour late to the Dahl home does not win her any sympathy from Crosland or Maschler. As a founder of the prestigious Booker Prize, and a long-time acquaintance of Dahl, Maschler has gravitas and a profound understanding of how to manage a bratty, bigoted, egotistic author. He does not take kindly to Stone, the ingenue, acting as if these dynamics did not matter.

Though Jewish, Maschler does not like how Stone waltzes into the Dahl residence and insert herself into an author-publisher relationship that he has spent years cultivating and on which the aforementioned millions of sales depend. He plainly resents the way that Stone feels free to act as if her own moral imperatives — namely, straightening out Dahl’s skewed view of the Lebanon crisis — come before the dynamics of that delicate, not to say precarious, relationship. As things grow tenser between Stone and Dahl, Maschler vents right back at Stone from his own perspective as a Holocaust survivor who resents antisemitism, as well he should, but dislikes Stone’s self-importance. Dahl, like the overgrown kid he is, rebels. The big unfriendly giant does not win the PR war, but that was never his goal.

Like screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Rosenblatt is not over-concerned about whether a plot point is literally true or not, just whether it makes for a compelling story. As the playbill acknowledges, “Many details and characters in Giant are drawn from Dahl’s life, others are invented. Two things, however, are the real Dahl’s: his book review and the final phone call are quoted verbatim. Both belong to the real Roald Dahl’s complex legacy.”

Maschler is based on the real publisher Tom Maschler, but Stone is a character invented as a means of approaching Dahl in a more direct and dramatic way. Her confrontation with the author is as lively as anything you will see on stage this year: uncomfortable and thought-provoking.

As noted above, the play curiously raises a number of issues without doing them justice. If anything, I wish that Stone had gone a bit further in her testing of Dahl’s grasp of the moral dimensions of the 1982 conflict: for example, by asking Dahl whether he knew that Israel invaded Lebanon only after patient attempts to use air strikes to quell PLO shelling of Israel — and the deaths of Israeli citizens — failed. Stone might also have asked Dahl how he felt about the June 3, 1982, terrorist shooting of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to London, which put Argov in a coma for months with a horrific head injury and left him paralyzed for life. Surely, those facts would have been on the mind of anyone who had taken Israel’s side in this play’s 1983 setting, yet they go unmentioned precisely where one would expect them to come up.

A play about the limits of intellectual and moral courage should have no hesitations about confronting antisemitism with facts, or about presenting truths that might infuriate the “globalize the intifada” crowd who, in 2026, are unwilling to admit that their slogans amounts to a call for pogroms against Jewish people worldwide.

The acting and dialogue are impeccable, and there is even more to Giant than this exploration of the common humanity of people who loathe each other’s views. It is at once a play about class in Britain with Crosland, Dahl, Maschler, Hallie, and Wally the gardener (David Manis) engaging in a complex interplay of power relationships, and, on yet another level, a play about the differences between American and British Jews.

The world today is not so different from the one of 1983, but a moral giant with the courage to court professional risk on behalf of the embattled state of Israel is a rare thing indeed. The play is really only about one type of giant, the one that Lithgow has memorably brought back to life.