Lithgow AND Rosenblatt Tackle the Complexity of Roald Dahl’s GIANT

Broadway rarely invites audiences into a subject this combustible, but GAINT has arrived in New York determined to do exactly that. The Olivier Award-winning play, now in previews at the Music Box Theatre ahead of its 23 March opening, brings John Lithgow back to Broadway as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s drama, directed by Nicholas Hytner.

Set across a single afternoon in the summer of 1983, it finds Dahl at home as THE WITCHES approaches publication and the fallout from his review of GOD CRIED refuses to die down. From there, the play becomes a tense reckoning with prejudice, reputation and the stories celebrated public figures tell themselves when the pressure closes in.

Rosenblatt’s route into the material was political before it was literary. In his interview with Playbill, he says the spark came in 2018, when an investigation found structurally embedded antisemitism in Britain’s Labour Party. He was troubled by how discussion of Israel and Palestine kept collapsing into either antisemitism or Islamophobia, and that unease sent him back to a half-remembered accusation against Dahl. When he tracked down the review at the centre of the controversy, he found more than a scandalous footnote in a famous writer’s life. He found a way to dramatise how moral conviction, fear and bigotry can become dangerously entangled.

The play’s official synopsis frames Dahl as a world-famous children’s author under threat, forced to choose between apologising and risking his legacy. On stage, the crisis centres on his response to Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton’s GOD CRIED, a book about the Israeli siege and bombing of Beirut. Rosenblatt’s interest is not in turning the theatre into a lecture hall. What draws him, and what gives GIANT its sting, is the muddied space where genuine political feeling can slide into dehumanising language. That makes the play feel less like a history lesson than an argument happening in real time.

Its relevance intensified after 7 October, though neither Rosenblatt nor Lithgow says the work was created in reaction to those events. Lithgow told Playbill the script was finalised more than a month before the Hamas attacks in southern Israel, and that not a word has been altered since. Even so, the context changed everything. He has said that on 8 October he wrote to Hytner and Rosenblatt asking whether they could possibly go ahead, worried the subject had become too volatile. Their answer was that this was exactly the moment to do it. In the UK, the demonstrations they feared never materialised.

That refusal to spoon-feed an answer is a large part of the play’s appeal. Rosenblatt has said he was not interested in writing some final ruling on the conflict, but in giving voice to a wide and difficult spectrum of thought. Lithgow, for his part, describes GIANT as unusual in the clarity with which it stages opposing arguments, not only between Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, but within Jewish communities as well. The effect, he says, is immediate. People do not leave quietly. They come out talking. Lithgow has even compared the risk of bringing it to Broadway to the shock of M. Butterfly, a reminder of how rarely commercial theatre chooses to unsettle on purpose.

Lithgow also seems drawn to the role because GIANT refuses to flatten Dahl into either monster or genius. He has described him as witty, charismatic and deeply dangerous, a man whose charm could turn into savagery without warning.

To understand that contradiction, Lithgow and Rosenblatt have looked closely at the shocks that shaped Dahl’s life, including childhood loss, the brutality of boarding school, a wartime crash that left him in pain for years, and later tragedies affecting his children. Rosenblatt argues that these experiences fed a powerful urge to fix whatever had gone wrong, visible even in Dahl’s work on a medical valve to help his injured son Theo. When he could not repair the world, the playwright suggests, helplessness hardened into anger.

Research only made the portrait stranger and more human. Lithgow said one of his most useful sources was Maria Tucci, widow of editor Robert Gottlieb, who knew Dahl well. Through her, he found a man who could be magnetic with children, gathering them up at parties and entertaining them for hours, even as he alienated adults. That tension is the real material of GIANT. The Broadway production follows a London run that won three Olivier Awards, and Lithgow is joined at the Music Box by Aya Cash, Elliot Levey, Rachael Stirling, Stella Everett and David Manis. But the production’s real selling point is not its pedigree. It is the unease it is willing to sit with, and the insistence that theatre can still make room for difficult conversation.