TL;DR
Mark Rosenblatt's Broadway play 'Giant,' with John Lithgow as Roald Dahl, continues its run amid sustained critical and cultural controversy.
MSM Perspective
Reviews praise Lithgow's performance while debating the play's central argument: that Dahl's Israel-Palestine politics and his antisemitism were related but not identical.
X Perspective
Audiences and critics are split on whether 'Giant' lets Dahl off too easy or serves as a necessary reckoning with antisemitism in literary culture.
Mark Rosenblatt's "Giant" — the Olivier Award-winning play about Roald Dahl's antisemitism, now transferred to Broadway with John Lithgow in the title role — continues its run and continues to generate the kind of discomfort that distinguishes serious theater from the merely diverting.
The play's central conceit involves a confrontation between Dahl and a Jewish editor over a 1983 review in which Dahl wrote, among other things, that there was "a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity." The play asks whether Dahl's virulent criticism of Israel's actions in Lebanon — criticism that was not, strictly speaking, wrong — necessarily slid into something uglier. It does not answer the question cleanly, which is either its great virtue or its great failure depending on the critic.
The New York Stage Review called the production "volcanic." America Magazine found it struggling with the tragedy of a man whose moral clarity about the powerful was poisoned by his contempt for Jews as a people. The Times of Israel described Dahl as "a warped messenger for a vital debate about Israel" — which gets at the play's essential discomfort: the questions it raises are real, the vessel raising them was compromised.
In 2020 Dahl's family issued a belated apology for his antisemitism. His books continued selling. The discomfort does not resolve, on Broadway or anywhere else.
Lithgow, by every account, is extraordinary.
-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, New York