A Giant Among Men: John Lithgow is Unmissable
The first thing you notice is the size of him. John Lithgow is 6'3", and Bob Crowley's set makes him feel even larger. He looms over furniture and people, filling doorframes, a man whose physical presence seems to bend the room around him. Roald Dahl was famously 6'6", and Lithgow doesn't quite match that, but it doesn't matter. He has the same quality Dahl apparently had in life: the sense that the air changes when he enters it. That he expects to be accommodated. We learn that perhaps he always has been.
The play takes place over a single summer afternoon in 1983. The Witches is about to hit shelves, and Dahl is being forced to reckon with the fallout from a recently published, explicitly antisemitic article. His fiancée Felicity (Rachael Stirling), his publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), and American sales executive Jessie Stone (Aya Cash) are all there — each with a stake in what he does next. The question on the table is simple: will he apologize? The answer, as the afternoon unravels, is considerably more complicated.
Picture by Joan Marcus
This is Mark Rosenblatt's debut play, and it's a remarkable one — it won three Olivier Awards including Best New Play before landing here.
Going in, you might wonder how explicit Dahl's antisemitism could really have been. The answer, when it comes, is blunt and a little shocking even when you’ve seen glimpses of it over the course of two hours. There's a phone call late in the play where Lithgow's Dahl just lets himself be who he is. He looks like a kid contentedly sucking an Everlasting Gobstopper, but there’s nothing sweet about the gleeful vitriol emanating from him.
Because that's the real thesis of Giant: Dahl could write children so well because he never stopped being one. Not in the charming sense — in the arrested, emotionally stunted, I-want-what-I-want-and-consequences-are-for-other-people sense. The cruelty in his books, the gleeful nastiness of his villains, is well entrenched in the man himself.
Aya Cash plays Jessie Stone, and she gets verbally battered for most of the afternoon — Dahl treats her the way he treats most people, which is to say as furniture that has inexplicably and amusingly started talking back. Elliot Levey's Maschler is more unsettling: a man who thought they were friends. Who maybe still isn't sure they aren't. There's an amorality to him that creeps up on you — not villainy, just a profound willingness to look the other way when the relationship suits him.
What stays with you walking out isn't the antisemitism itself, or even Lithgow's ferocity. It's the pointlessness of it. Here is a man of genuine genius — an imagination that gave generations of children the best years of their reading lives — and he spent it nursing a hatred so specific and so petty it can barely support its own weight. Why? The play doesn't answer that, and it's right not to. But it does ask the harder question, the one that follows you out onto 45th Street: who around Dahl let it slide? Who decided the books were worth the blind eye? And then, inevitably, the question turns on you. We all have someone in our lives we've quietly excused. Someone whose gifts or warmth or usefulness to us has become a reason not to look too closely. We're appalled by Dahl, sitting safe in the dark. But the play has the nerve to suggest that the distance between us and Tom Maschler might be shorter than we'd like to think.