Giant play review: Roald Dahl show is great but not perfect
Giant play review and star rating: ★★★★
Roald Dahl defied the image we cherish in our minds. He was charismatic, but in a way that masqueraded his poisonous views. He was also an anti-Semite, writing in the New Statesman in 1983 that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews.”
He seemed to survive cancellation, but then Mark Rosenblatt wrote Giant, an expansive, allegorical story imagining Dahl with one foot in the grave, partly focused on retaining sales figures for his books, but increasingly interested in the indulgent desserts his private chef delivers him for lunch.
To dispel the controversy around his article, publishers Tom Maschler and Jessica Stone attempt to convince Dahl to apologise, but they must engage in an exhausting battle with his ego. Rosenblatt’s story is fictitious, but based on real-life reports of journalists who interviewed Dahl during the period who were shocked by his over-archingly racist, reductive opinions.
Giant play: Roald Dahl’s wife is perhaps the most interesting character, because she’s the only one who lives here
Just about everything is in place to make this a killer evening at the theatre. There are tremendous performances, especially from the towering John Lithgow, whose knack for delivering hideous racism with conversational aplomb – “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” – will go down in history. Elliot Levey’s Maschler, perennially both in charge and totally out of his own depth, is so stressed you’re nervous to look at him, and there’s ingenious comic relief from Tessa Bonham as the grounding force, checked-out in-house cook Hallie, forever calling Roald “Mr D”.
Most interesting is Rachael Stirling’s Felicity Crossland, later to become Dahl’s wife, because she’s the only one who always has to live here when the others finish work and return to their lives. Stirling’s layered performance gets across Crossland’s conundrum; she will challenge Dahl but she’s fundamentally love blind (in 1983 Dahl left his wife of 30 years to settle down with Crossland, a friend of his wife with whom he’d been having an affair for 11 years).
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Giant play director Nicholas Hytner has done a fab job of framing the grimness with lightness and energy. Dahl’s airy, high-ceilinged period home is being refurbished, bringing freshness and rebirth despite it all, everyone at home seems to always be enjoying the mid-afternoon sun. There’s plenty of Chablis and there’s always someone bowling through the door with something delicious to eat. The message that horrors happen in plain view is effective, though it’s a tad over-produced: tinned birdsong is distracting and superfluous.
‘Giant offers a revelatory character study of Dahl, who wasn’t who we thought he was’
Perhaps Rosenblatt is also guilty of worrying too much about giving the production sheen. It would have been interesting to introduce a stronger challenger to Dahl from within his own family, or a friend. While conversations about the root of Dahl’s bigotry simmer, I struggled to find the pressure point between Stone, a young worker, and Dahl. Why would he apologise to her? You always feel his stubbornness and beliefs matter more than money, so the threat of business pales. At the end of the day, if he doesn’t apologise, Stone’s just had a bad day at the office with an elderly racist. It’s hardly her own father. The stakes aren’t quite high enough. An awkwardly timed interval also suggests the Giant play may have been better as a sharp one-act 90 minutes straight through.
If it is occasionally meandering and ever-so slightly underpowered, it is nonetheless a revelatory character study: Dahl wasn’t who we thought he was, but despite his immensely hateful opinions, Rosenthall has made Dahl believable. Horridly contradictory, but palpably real.
The Giant play runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 2 August
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