Back in 2023, a bitter debate erupted over the editing of Roald Dahl’s children’s books. His publishers, Puffin Books, had worked with Dahl’s estate (now owned by Netflix) to remove references to violence, body size, mental health, gender and skin colour. Now, a new play about an incident in Dahl’s later life is focusing on another controversy.
Giant (written by Mark Rosenblatt) is playing at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre until August 2. It features a masterly performance by John Lithgow in the role of Dahl. The play tracks the fallout from his 1983 review of God Cried, a photographic book by Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton about the Israeli army’s siege of west Beirut.
However, in Rosenblatt’s blend of fact and fiction, the very real controversy arose not from the review, but from an interview Dahl gave that many Jewish and non-Jewish readers objected to as antisemitism (others saw it as a justified critique of Israel’s actions during the Lebanon war). This is melded with an imaginary situation in which Jewish representatives from Dahl’s British and American publishers visit his home to calm the backlash.
