The biggest, most trenchant laugh on the London stage is nightly cracking up the audience at the West End staging of “Roald Dahl, is remarkable. In the charged-up near silence that follows, the most exciting sound is that of an often-shocked audience hanging on the characters’ every thought.
Newly transferred into the West End after an SRO run at the re-invigorated Royal Court Theatre, Nicholas Hytner’s beautifully cast production in a winner. And while it is comfortably old-fashioned in form — a naturalistic set of (increasingly fiery) discussions before, during and after lunch — the intelligence, vigor and controlled surprises with which, so to speak, new wine is poured into old bottles makes it wholly arresting. And urgent.
Fights around Jewish and Israeli identities are, to put it mildly, currently highly pertinent but Rosenblatt’s gripper is no predictable commentary on current events since the play predates the actions, let alone the aftermath, of October 7. Indeed, after long gestation, a three-day workshop to develop the play finished a month earlier.
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Although the dialogue and its sole American character are invented, the events and the remainder of the dramatis personae are drawn from fact.
One summer’s day in 1983, with “The Witches” nearing publication, Dahl (John Lithgow) and his ex-mistress and soon-to-be-new-wife Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling) are hosting lunch for his high-ranking British publisher Tom Maschler (Elliott Levey), who is going over the proofs of the new book with him. Last to arrive is Jessie Stone, a sales director at Farrar, Straus, Giroux, his American publishers… who are nervous. This has nothing to do with present-day concerns about Dahl’s argued-over viciousness towards his characters and everything to do with a book review Dahl wrote in a right-leaning current affairs magazine being splashed across the British press — with the New York Times hovering — for being antisemitic.
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Will Dahl issue some form of an apology so as to steady his publishers’ nerves? Will he recognize that he may have overstepped a line? Does he even recognize there is a line? Is his support of a serious book that is scathing about Israeli attacks in Lebanon in 1982 valid?
There is enough meat here for more than one earnest debate-play, but mercifully, Rosenbatt hasn’t written it. Better still, in these days of binary positioning, the play holds its audience in thrall because Dahl’s firmly held positions, and those of everyone around him, are never simplistic. Rosenblatt craftily rebalances sympathies via perfectly plotted revelations that have nothing to do with cheaply withheld information and everything to do with truths being aired through complexities of character and properly dramatic circumstances. The cumulative effect is as complicated as it is entertaining and, unusually, scary.
Which is absolutely as it should be. No one needs a play in which inflammatory positions and arguments aren’t genuinely dangerous. Quoted out of context, some of the character-driven dialogue could cause offense as frightening truths on both sides are exposed. But thanks to Rosenblatt and Hytner’s immense degree of responsibility, the danger enriches the arguments. Better yet, the play even addresses an idea not current in 1983: cancel culture. If Dahl is unrepentant, what does that mean for generations who have grown up on “Matilda” or “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”?
At the center of the Olivier Award-winning play is John Lithgow who (against stiff competition) also bagged the Olivier for Best Actor. Lumbering and yet serpentine in his cunning, he has the advantage of resembling Dahl, who was a 6’ 4” giant — hence, in part, the title — but for all his heft, the power of his performance is in its terrifying suggestion. Grouchy and grandiloquent by turn, he keeps rage in reserve and instead ignites the room with flashes of lethal humor. As much as Dahl ever was, Lithgow is in total control, one minute purring, only occasionally roaring. Ricocheting between victim and viciousness, he cajoles yet controls the entire household.
He’s ideally matched by a deft Stirling, who brings a delicious edge to Dahl’s wise and long-suffering partner whose sense of pragmatism allows her to quietly present solutions when all about are fighting. And Levey is infinitely subtle as Dahl’s Jewish publisher, whose identity and allegiance is called into question. His performance won him the Best Supporting Actor Olivier, and with good reason, since he brings an almost-ease to a man presented in near permanent conflict. Like Lithgow, his performance is supremely unshowy, the flashes of passion being timed and placed by him and Hytner to erupt only when strictly necessary to the developing drama.
The only new cast member is Aya Cash who has eased herself into the company with real distinction. As beautifully patient as her character, she never overplays her hand as an increasingly angry woman whose feeling and fury form much of the play’s emotional barometer. Rosenblatt gives her a humdinger of a first act closing speech complete with the kind of curtain line actors kill for. Cash takes the speech and runs with it but what makes it work is not obvious technique but thrillingly upsetting truth.
That the American Cash has been brought on board augurs well for a Broadway transfer, an idea that seems not so much likely as rightly inevitable. With the U.S. even more wedded to identity politics than the U.K., this is a powerhouse play whose time has most definitely come.
