As debut plays go, Giant has some very experienced hands behind it. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, who runs the Bridge Theatre, and written by Mark Rosenblatt, a director for more than two decades, it sounds like cheating to call it a debut although it is indeed Rosenblatt’s first foray into writing for the stage.
You would not know it from a slowly brilliant first act, stupendously performed by its cast, which mixes fact with fiction in its dramatisation of a scandalous moment in the life of the children’s writer Roald Dahl. It starts off breezily, heading into what seems like drawing room drama, before becoming as dark and sharp-toothed as one of Dahl’s fictive monsters.
