by Here the case is on stage one evening. An incendiary theme, an extraordinary debut piece, a brisk production, first-class acting. Everything on the wing. At the center of Mark Rosenblatt’s work giant Towers John Lithgow, great as Roald Dahl: passionate and angry, spiteful and bullying.
Tall and stooped, his long face like a magic lantern over which mice scurry, purse and wince, he pronounces the name of his American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) with a contemptuously drawn out “Girooooux,” as if it were a French affectation . He becomes frightening as the play progresses, but the outrageousness is heightened by the deep affection of his fly-free future wife: Rachael Stirling brings commanding intelligence to a finely written role – quirky but not pretentious.
Related: “I’m an ordinary man who plays crazy roles”: John Lithgow on dealing with Roald Dahl
The occasion of the piece is real: a 1983 book review by Dahl in which condemnation of the actions of the Israeli forces during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon turned into racist condemnation. The circumstances are presented: a meeting with his real-life British publisher, Tom Maschler, and a fictional representative of the FSG, Jessie Stone, in which the two publishers, both Jews, try to convince Dahl to deny all anti-Semitism and accept bad publicity as his new avoid book The witches appears. The debate is intense and precise: Dahl describes the massacre in Beirut; Romola Garai as Stone, who shimmers between nervous and courageous and represents the difference between the government and the people of Israel. The final moments are rattlesnake shocking. Dahl seemed about to comply, casually shouting a load of anti-Semitic vitriol at him New statesman: The words here are Dahl’s: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on them for no reason.”
One detailed argument leads to another, and the play is better if it doesn’t resolve them all
Nicholas Hytner’s production is characterized by exceptional clarity and conviction, supported by Bob Crowley’s fine design of cluttered (construction work infuriates the author) comfort. giant has no fancy shape, but its movement is complicated. One detailed argument leads to another, and the play is better if it doesn’t resolve them all. Should an author’s opinions influence what we read? Could The witches with its “child-snatching and money-printing devils” be read as coded anti-Semitism? Is it racism that allows Israelis to view “someone else’s home” as their own “sanctuary”? Does the need for provocation that lies behind some of Dahl’s confrontations – and that made his books so vivid – undermine his accusations? It is a great strength of Lithgow’s extraordinary performance that he suggests that Dahl’s revulsion at killings in Lebanon was as real as his anti-Semitism – and not caused by it.
I have another interest in giant. Four years before the play’s action, I worked with Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Elliot Levey’s excellent characterization – meticulously subtle as always – is by no means an imitation. Magnetically energetic, dashing, boastful and gifted, Maschler could sense the financial or aesthetic success of a book – Philip Roth or Jeffrey Archer – just by looking at a manuscript. Dahl from Lithgow jokes about not really reading: It’s unfair, but it hits a nerve. As does Rosenblatt’s examination of a sensitive area – the friendship between publisher and author. Maschler’s inner life appeared more through books than through people. Ask him how he’s doing and he’ll tell you how many titles he has on the bestseller list. In his autobiography (a book that would not have ended up on the Cape list), he cites a long letter from Dahl as evidence of his affection, without noting that the story is only about Dahl. Rosenblatt taps into the blind naivety unexpected in a hawkish actor to deliver a harrowing moment of betrayal. Like everything in this telling script, it rings shockingly true.
Occasionally, friendship triumphed over Maschler’s commercial instinct. He continued to publish Arnold Wesker long after the writer had ceased to be fashionable as one of the 1950s playwrights who had disrupted the gentility of the stage. Diyan Zora’s production of roots makes loyalty seem justified.
The story of Beatie Bryant, the young woman from a family of East Anglian farm workers who sees a broader horizon through a London friend but is stunned into silence, is an extraordinary work: intimate and visionary. In the naturalistic style of its time – zinc bath with scented cubes – it unfolds calmly with patterned, repetitive comic dialogue about buses and indigestion. But Wesker dominates the stage masterfully (his Kitchen is a lesson in how to tell a story through choreography) and always surprises. Some of them are thrill rides. A woman has the most adventurous voice. The action takes place in the countryside, a place more or less untouched by theater outside of Chekhov and Shakespeare. The monotonous dialogue is – as has since been the case with Caryl Churchill – interrupted by visionary episodes. Sophie Stanton is great as the supposedly limited but smart mother who works in the kitchen. Morfydd Clark is at her most convincing when she’s shaking, giving the last famous speech in which, sans men, she finds her own voice, as if genuinely surprised by her own changing eloquence. I was surprised, even though I was prepared for the unleashing, by the movement.
Which I wasn’t during Atri Banerjee’s revival of the more celebrated plays Look back angrily (1956). The production is based in a certain way on John Osborne’s description of his play: Jimmy Porter’s outbursts of anger are not “tirades” but “arias”. Although the crucial ironing board and other realistic details were still used (a friend who saw the 1956 premiere said it was a shock simply to see people on stage reading the Sunday newspapers, one of them). observer), Naomi Dawson’s design is understated, with a central pit that invites the feuding couple into hell and lighting by Lee Curran so intense it suggests a deadly battle of wits. Billy Howle shines as Porter: as raw and varied as poor Tom King Lear Pagan. But for all his power, his speeches are puny: Osborne boasts about his misogynistic power. It’s adventurous for the Almeida – a theater everyone should subscribe to – to offer this historical snapshot in its Gry and Young season. But it’s time to look forward, not back.
Star ratings (out of five)
giant ★★★★★
roots ★★★★
Look back angrily ★★★
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giant is at the Jerwood Theater Downstairs, Royal Court, London until November 16th
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roots is at Almeida, London until November 23rd
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Look back angrily is at Almeida, London until November 23rd
