LONDON — Hailed as “one of the greatest storytellers” of the 20th century, Roald Dahl wrote some of Britain’s most beloved children’s books, sprinkled with magical characters like “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Matilda,” and “Danny, the Champion of the World.”
He was also a vicious antisemite.
That paradox rests at the heart of Jewish playwright Mark Rosenblatt’s new play, “Giant,” which opened last month at London’s Royal Court Theatre.
It is set in the summer of 1983 when Dahl — newly divorced and recently engaged to his mistress — finds himself plunged into a media storm. With his new book “The Witches” weeks from publication, the Welsh-born novelist had authored a review of a photobook about the 1982 Lebanon War.
“In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis,” the piece began. “Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas chambers were being built and the mass slaughter of the Jews was beginning. Our hearts bled for the Jewish men, women and children, and we hated the Germans.”
“Exactly forty-one years later, in June 1982, the Israeli forces were streaming northwards out of what used to be Palestine into Lebanon, and the mass slaughter of the inhabitants began. Our hearts bled for the Lebanese and Palestinian men, women and children, and we all started hating the Israelis,” Dahl continued.
“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion. It is as though a group of much-loved nuns in charge of an orphanage had suddenly turned around and started murdering all the children.”
And that wasn’t all. “The authentic tales of horror and bestiality throughout this book,” he wrote, “make one wonder in the end what sort of people these Israelis are. It is like the good old Hitler and Himmler times all over again.”
As for the United States, Dahl said, it was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that it “dare not defy” Israel.
The only way for Jews outside Israel to redeem themselves, Dahl argued, was for them to become anti-Israeli. “But do they have the conscience,” he asked. “And do they, I wonder, have the guts.”
The review was rightly savaged in the press. Under the headline “An affront to decency,” the historian Paul Johnson labeled it “the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very long time.”
Rosenblatt’s play features an imaginary lunch at Dahl’s home in the English countryside, at which Tom Maschler — the real-life legendary head of Britain’s Jonathan Cape publishing house — and Jessie Stone, a fictionalized representative of his US publisher, Farrar Straus Giroux, plead with the author to issue an apology or, at least, admit the offense his words have caused. They’re quietly encouraged by Dahl’s fiancé, Felicity “Liccy” Crosland.
Rosenblatt, who began work on the play long before the October 7 atrocities and the ensuing war with Hamas, says it was prompted by his alarm as a British Jew at “how openly antisemitic language and stereotyping was blurring with meaningful, constructive debate around Israel and Palestine.”
But why did Rosenblatt choose the decades-old controversy around Dahl as the vehicle to explore this fraught topic? “I thought, what if our way into this story was through someone that we know and love, and have an affectionate relationship with?” he said in an interview with The Times newspaper.
While not a word of the script was changed in response to the events of the last year, the play, in which US actor John Lithgow masterfully takes the lead as Dahl, speaks directly to debates that have been noisily playing out across Europe and North America since October 7, 2023. “Giant” is also, as the universally fulsome reviews indicate, a remarkable triumph, which deserves a transfer to the West End and Broadway when its run comes to an end in the middle of next month.
Rosenblatt’s Dahl is no two-dimensional character, nor is he, at least at the outset, a horn-wearing villain. As Lithgow told The Observer newspaper: “He’s a charmer. Our intention is for people to find him witty, delectable and endearing… Until they don’t.”
A life of personal tragedy
The personal tragedies that punctured Dahl’s own life — in 1962, his 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, died of measles, while his 4-month-old son, Theo, suffered a severe brain injury in an accident in 1960 — and the empathy this engenders are evident. He argues about Israel ferociously with Stone, whose Jewishness he has brought up moments after she arrives in his home — “Stone. Was that Stein once?” he slyly asks. But, amid the rancor, he correctly deduces that her teenage son, Archie, also has brain damage, and breaks off the conversation to encourage and sympathize with her.
Nor does Dahl’s undoubted appeal to generations of children go unacknowledged. In his books, Maschler argues at one point, Dahl “picks a glorious playful path through the chaos of childhood. It’s the rarest of gifts. To show its cruelty but take you out the other side.”
Despite the dark subject matter, Rosenblatt also introduces light moments of humor. Dahl, for instance, tries to induce his cook, Hallie, who has hovered on the edge of the dinner table throughout the recriminations, to offer an opinion. “Would you buy an Israeli avocado or would refusing to buy it be ‘antisemitic,’” he asks sneeringly. “Does the avocado know it’s Israeli?” she responds without missing a beat.
Ultimately, however, the play revolves around the point at which legitimate criticism of Israel crosses a line into antisemitic anti-Zionism.
Rosenblatt allows Dahl’s undoubted longstanding sympathy for the Palestinians an airing. It comes across as genuine — even if his view of the conflict is Manichean, simplistic and strips the Palestinians of any agency — as does his horror at the bloodshed in Beirut. That that horror is focused on children — for whom Dahl undoubtedly had an affinity — adds to its authenticity, even if his sympathies clearly don’t extend to children who happen to have been born in Israel.
Stone, who initially tries to confine herself to warning Dahl of the potential damage the controversy might cause to book sales in the US, is eventually poked and taunted by the author into confronting the issue head-on. Attractive, articulate and poised, she proves more than a match for Dahl.
What, she asks him, would the British government do if terrorists “constitutionally committed” to the destruction of the UK “started firing rockets into Kent from the French coast?” To Dahl’s response — “They wouldn’t lay waste a city,” — she replies: “Dresden, Nagasaki?”
When Dahl explodes, “How dare you compare them,” Stone offers a devastating riposte: “Why… because the British couldn’t be anything other than noble and heroic, the saviors of humanity, whilst those fucking Jews can only be monsters! And because if it’s self-defense it would suggest — God forbid! — they have a rightful country to defend.”
Then, referring to Dahl’s much-vaunted wartime exploits as a fighter pilot, she concludes: “You saved the Jews in Europe only to find the Jews weren’t worth saving. That it? Hero’s remorse? And now you want their devil-state brought to its knees?”
Rosenblatt is, however, too astute an observer of British Jewry to let Stone’s staunch support for Israel rest as the last word on the subject. Instead, in Maschler, who escaped to the UK from Nazi Germany as a child, he presents the more complex and nuanced relationship some British Jews feel towards Israel.
“I don’t pine for Jerusalem. Don’t crave being in the majority,” he says. The idea of “shacking up with 4 million other Jews” leads him to shudder. “I am English,” the tennis-loving Maschler, who has evidently eschewed the north London “kosher belt” for upscale Kensington, bellows three times. When challenged by Stone as to where he would go if his home country ever turned against him for being Jewish, he responds: “Provence,” — the region of France much-beloved by the British middle classes.
Anachronistic insertion of cancel culture
While hardly a topic in the mid-1980s, the play touches on the modern-day phenomenon of cancel culture. “Tell me, if I’m all these terrible things to you,” Dahl asks Stone, “things I can’t see in myself, can you no longer read my books to dear Archie? If it’s in me, then surely it’s in the books too?”
Rosenblatt himself has made clear that he doesn’t believe Dahl should be “canceled” and says he reads the author’s books to his 5-year-old son.
“I don’t think, fundamentally, those adult views about other adults, spoken outside of his work as a children’s writer, are explicitly, specifically driving the stories,” he told The Times. “People are complicated. We’re all complicated. I’m not forgiving him for what he said, but I have to be able to hold two truths at once.”
That view appears to be held by many other parents who continue to purchase Dahl’s books in huge numbers. Worldwide, the Roald Dahl Story Company says, one of his books — which have been translated into 63 languages and sold more than 300 million copies — is sold every 2.6 seconds. Such are their enduring appeal that in 2021 his estate sold the rights to the books to streaming channel Netflix for a reported $686 million.
Nonetheless, Dahl himself has become a far more contentious figure. That distinction was illustrated by the approach adopted by Britain’s Royal Mint, which in 2014 issued stamps celebrating his books while deciding that because of his association with antisemitism, it would not issue a commemorative coin to mark the centenary of his birth in 2016.
Can the author be separated from his books so neatly? In Dahl’s case, as Stone suggests, there may well be a seamless thread. “You’re a belligerent, nasty child,” she tells the author. “These threats and cruelties… a child’s. It’s the gift of your work, but the curse of your life.”
In 2020, on the eve of the Netflix deal, Dahl’s family issued a statement in which it apologized for “the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements.” It continued: “Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew.”
But the apology that mattered most — from Dahl himself — never came. Instead, his rhetoric became more extreme.
While Rosenblatt necessarily invents the dinner-table conversation that takes place in “Giant,” he carefully ensures Dahl’s actual public statements — not just the Literary Review article at the heart of the play, but his later utterances — are used in the play’s closing scenes.
Not content with the offense he had already caused by his comments about Lebanon, days later, Dahl told the New Statesman magazine: “This I did not dare to say, but there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
His comments about Jews lacking guts, Dahl said, stemmed from his own wartime experience when “we saw almost none of them in the armed forces.” Recalling the exchange nearly four decades later, journalist Michael Coren wrote: “He was polite and not unfriendly and entirely grotesque.”
Seven years later in 1990, shortly before his death, Dahl finally came out publicly as an antisemite. Having attacked the “Jewish-owned” media which allegedly “hushed up” Israel’s supposed crimes in Lebanon, he said: “I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism.”
Rosenblatt has claimed “Giant” is not a “hatchet job.” And ultimately, it is Dahl’s own words, not Rosenblatt’s, that definitively condemn the novelist.
