![\"Aya](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/c6350d56b5d368bab27c7ad8c61521dc95-giant-review.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Aya Cash, John Lithgow, Stella Everett, and Rachael Stirling in Giant, at the Music Box.
\n Photo: Joan Marcus\n <\/p>\n
What is it about our children\u2019s book authors? Orson Scott Card wrote a whole series<\/a> preoccupied with the devastating results of interspecies misunderstanding and intolerance, then followed it up with various noxious statements cementing his homophobia. J. K. Rowling dreamed up a young wizard protected from evil by an act of pure love, and now spends her time penning ever more needlessly hateful tweets<\/a>. And Roald Dahl? Dahl specialized in young protagonists who evade and defy the viciousness of a twisted grown-up world, and then, in 1983, he went on the record with a truly nauseating barrage of antisemitism. \u201cThere is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity,\u201d Dahl told a journalist at the New Statesman. \u201cI mean, there\u2019s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn\u2019t just pick on them for no reason.\u201d<\/p>\n Even setting the moral horror and cruelty of his remarks aside, why would a successful artist, about to publish a new book and being considered for a knighthood, shoot a torpedo right into his flourishing career? Mark Rosenblatt sets out to tease apart this kind of gnarly question in Giant, a high-stakes actors\u2019 showcase of a play that becomes all the more prodigious in light of the fact that it\u2019s Rosenblatt\u2019s first (since the late \u201990s he\u2019s worked predominantly as a director). Now he\u2019s got an Olivier for it \u2014 and so do John Lithgow, swaying ominously in the breeze as the vexed figure of the title, and Eliot Levey, playing Dahl\u2019s British publisher, Tom Maschler<\/a>. Nicholas Hytner directs the West End transfer with a touch both spare and unsparing: There are no frills here, no atmospheric flourishes. The lights jump from blackout to full and back to black to punctuate the show\u2019s two acts. We crash right into speech and tumble along with it. These people \u2014\u00a0especially Dahl \u2014\u00a0are creatures of language, and the more words spill across the stage, the more slippery and treacherous everything gets.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a bright, clear day at Gipsy House \u2014 the famous author\u2019s rambling old country seat in Buckinghamshire, currently under major construction overseen by his fianc\u00e9e, Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling) \u2014\u00a0as the play begins. Dahl chuckles over some new drawings for his forthcoming book The Witches by his longtime collaborator, the illustrator Quentin Blake, or shouts \u201cNo, no, no, no!\u201d when something isn\u2019t in the right place, scraping away at the proofs with an unsatisfactory pencil. (\u201cIt\u2019s like writing with an ice cream,\u201d Lithgow sneers, his vowels like taffy.) Felicity (\u201cLiccy\u201d for short) and Tom, who\u2019s brought Dahl the proofs, both handle the grinningly combative writer with a light touch \u2014 Tom is wry and deflective, Liccy affectionate. Hallie, the sweet-faced New Zealander cook, is serving salade Ni\u00e7oise for lunch. What could disturb such pleasant, easy routine?<\/p>\n It\u2019s those jackhammers and bandsaws in the background we should be paying attention to, though. They betray an underlying agitation, one that rises to the surface with the arrival of a new guest, eventually shattering all Tom and Liccy\u2019s attempts at sangfroid. The stranger is Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), a sales director at Dahl\u2019s U.S. publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and before she\u2019s even entered the room, she\u2019s got two strikes against her: She\u2019s American and she\u2019s young. \u201cA child. They always send me children\u2026\u201d Dahl gripes. \u201cJust because I write about them doesn\u2019t mean I have to be managed by them \u2026 Bet they don\u2019t send Kingsley Amis children.\u201d<\/p>\n Jessie is, of course, not a child and not there for the salade Ni\u00e7oise. Neither is Tom, though he masks it better. The play\u2019s inciting incident has already occurred: Dahl has published a review of God Cried, a book of photojournalism about the Israeli siege of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war. In it, he\u2019s written (and did write \u2014\u00a0they\u2019re out there and easy to find) things that far exceed humanitarian rage or opposition to Israeli policy. He\u2019s spoken contemptuously and monolithically of Jews as \u201ca race of people\u201d who have turned from \u201cmuch-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.\u201d He\u2019s said plenty more, too, and now his publishers from both sides of the Atlantic \u2014 along with the woman who loves him and plans to marry him \u2014 are here to try to defuse an already exploding bomb. \u201cHe just needs to say something publicly. However small\u2026\u201d says Tom to Liccy. \u201cThen we can use it. Then it\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n There was a moment late in Giant when I realized I could feel my own heartbeat, cranked up with anxiety. The waters the real Dahl waded into were boiling then and haven\u2019t dropped a degree since. \u201cRoald has spent years, long before I knew him, supporting desperate people, children especially, around the world,\u201d Liccy protests to Jessie in a moment alone together. \u201cLebanon broke his heart.\u201d Part of what gives Giant such voltage in a present context has to do not simply with what\u2019s still happening in Gaza, but also with the phenomenon, much on display these days, of how a thinking person can break morally bad. Any trajectory away from humanity includes multiple moments of doubling down \u2014 forks in the road where the uglier path was taken. We dig our heels in; then, before we know it, we\u2019ve dug our own grave.<\/p>\n Lithgow \u2014 so nimble and charismatic and then suddenly so imposing, with no aversion to the grotesque \u2014 knows how to bring out the insecurity that almost always festers at the center of any performatively self-certain action. His Dahl is constantly goading people, driving them right up to the edge of their tolerance. There\u2019s something disturbingly childish in this compulsion: He likes to play with things until they break. He also feeds on attention, whether or not it takes the form of revulsion. His increasingly nasty scenes with Cash have a kind of sick chemistry to them. Like a Shakespearean villain, this Dahl isn\u2019t looking to be placated \u2014\u00a0he\u2019s looking for a fight, and he can sense that Jessie, however polite and professional she\u2019s been sent here to be, will give him one.<\/p>\n He\u2019s also looking, for all his gnashing teeth and wicked repartee, for a friend. And again like a child, this time one with no sense of his own privilege, he turns, when no one else can see him, to the help. \u201cWhat should I do? Say sorry?\u201d he asks Hallie (Stella Everett), who\u2019s spent the play trying to maintain her smile and steer well clear of questions like this one. \u201cWhat should I do?\u201d He needles her. \u201cWhat? What? What?!\u201d The sarcasm taints the question but doesn\u2019t invalidate it. Moments before, he\u2019s talked briefly with the gardener, Wally (David Manis), who, according to Rosenblatt\u2019s stage directions, is several years older and one inch taller than Dahl. (\u201cYou know the groundsman,\u201d Dahl later tells Jessie, \u201che\u2019s partly the inspiration for a certain other cracking children\u2019s story<\/a>.\u201d) \u201cApparently I have to apologize,\u201d says the slightly shorter giant to the slightly taller one, without providing context. \u201cTo who?\u201d asks Wally, a little befuddled. \u201cThe world,\u201d mopes Dahl, setting up exactly the response he\u2019s hoping for. Big friendly Wally is affronted on principle: \u201cWha\u2019? You\u2019re not, are you tho\u2019? \u2026 You never bent to no-one afore.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the thing about some writers for children is that they haven\u2019t outgrown a certain deep craving for purity, for unpolluted good and indisputable bad. If, for instance, they receive death threats<\/a> in response to their stated politics (in Giant, Roald and Liccy are trying not to think about the fact that someone has left a phone message threatening to slit their throats), then instead of scrutinizing that violence on its own \u2014 as an act of malevolance that is not intrinsically associated with, say, trans liberation or Judaism \u2014 they lump it all together. They start to feel righteous \u2014\u00a0a persecuted hero to themselves. We know what Dahl eventually said, and it was the opposite of an apology. It made everything, including and especially him, worse. As the boulder of Giant rolls toward its inevitable conclusion, we sense the dull, crushing tragedy that will come with its impact. It is the tragedy of someone who had brains, heart, and imagination willfully becoming smaller. The giant shrinks, and all that grows is the world\u2019s stockpile of malice.<\/p>\n Giant is at the Music Box Theatre.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n