A GIANT PEACH OF AN ANTISEMITE

There’s something eerily familiar about the way John Lithgow adjusts his cardigan in Mark Rosenblatt‘s haunting new play Giant, now playing in the West End’s Harold Pinter Theatre, having transferred from Royal Court. Like a beloved uncle settling in for storytime, he radiates the practiced charm that made Roald Dahl one of the world’s most enduring children’s authors. The man who gave us James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The BFG continues enchanting new generations through constant adaptations. Broadway still mines his stories. Netflix still remakes them. Wes Anderson transformed The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar into visual poetry. But Rosenblatt’s debut asks the question our culture would rather sidestep: What happens when your favorite children’s author was also a raging antisemite?

Rosenblatt, better known as a director, has written something that mirrors Dahl’s own prose with seductive surfaces concealing undercurrents of ugliness. There are no grand revelations here, just the steady accumulation of ugly truths beneath charming façades. Think of it as Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in reverse, where the golden ticket leads not to wonder but to a quite different kind of factory entirely.

John Lithgow

The setting becomes complicit in this excavation. Bob Crowley‘s set captures Dahl’s real Gipsy House in Great Missenden, caught mid-renovation in 1983, with translucent plastic sheeting hung in clinical arcs over the back wall. The house stands in partial demolition, where nothing can be properly concealed, rather like its inhabitant’s reputation, or for that matter, like the literary canon itself, where beloved works float in preservative solution while their creators’ moral architecture slowly crumbles behind the scenes.

Against that architectural disarray, personal tensions flare. Into this domestic archaeology arrive two Jewish publishers: Tom Maschler from Jonathan Cape (real) and Jessie Stone from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (fictional yet utterly credible). They face the impossible mathematics that feels all too familiar today: how to protect a cultural asset who regards them as existential enemies. Dahl has just published a review of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that slides from political critique into blood libel territory, the kind of casual venom that sounds disturbingly contemporary to anyone scrolling through social media lately.

The Cast

What makes Lithgow’s performance so unsettling is how ordinary it feels. Once the lights dim and you feel the hush tighten as Lithgow’s paused breath hangs over the stage, here stands an actor who has charmed us through everything from 3rd Rock from the Sun to The Crown, deploying every ounce of that accumulated goodwill to reveal something horrifying. His Dahl doesn’t foam at the mouth. He remains reasonable, even avuncular, gentle with disabled children one moment, casually dispensing antisemite stereotypes the next. The performance demonstrates how charm can camouflage hate, and watching it feels uncomfortably like realizing your high school English teacher just shared something from a Holocaust denial site.

Aya Cash

Aya Cash‘s Jessie Stone moves through these scenes like someone navigating a minefield in evening wear. Every word is chosen with care, every smile professionally calibrated. Cash understands that dignity becomes both armor and target in such circumstances. Elliot Levey‘s Tom Maschler maintains his bonhomie, yet you can see the toll accumulating in each forced laugh. Rachael Stirling, as Dahl’s fiancée Felicity, embodies something we’ve all witnessed: the partner desperately smoothing over another’s latest appalling remark, love transformed into perpetual damage control.

Elliot Levey

Nicholas Hytner‘s direction wisely refuses theatrical flourishes. Just people talking in a room, which makes the whole enterprise more terrifying. This is how prejudice actually operates in polite society—not through dramatic confrontations but through casual conversation, assumptions so normalized they barely register as violence. The most chilling moments arrive without fanfare. Lithgow begins interrogating Stone’s Jewish identity with the same casual tone he might use to ask about her weekend plans. The mundane delivery makes the prejudice more frightening than any theatrical shouting match could.

The timing feels unnervingly prescient. As antisemitic incidents surge across the United States and Europe, as synagogues require armed guards and Jewish students navigate campus hostility that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago, Rosenblatt’s excavation reads less like historical curiosity than contemporary diagnosis. What he uncovers hasn’t disappeared—it has evolved, wearing fresh camouflage in our age of algorithmic amplification and performative outrage.

Richard Hope as Dahl's salt-of-the-earth handyman Wally Saunders, John Lithgow

Giant exposes machinery we rarely examine: the business of literary reputation management. We live through an unprecedented cultural reckoning where beloved figures from Dr. Seuss to J.K. Rowling find their legacies under scrutiny. Yet discussions usually focus on individual artists rather than the institutions that protect and promote them. Rosenblatt shows us the publishers, agents, and gatekeepers who manufacture literary immortality, revealing how moral compromise disguises itself as aesthetic necessity.

There is something almost quaint about watching this 1983 crisis of conscience unfold, given how thoroughly our culture has normalized such compromises. In an era when we separate art from artist with industrial efficiency, when streaming services serve up content from proven abusers with barely a content warning, the anguish these characters feel protecting one antisemite feels charmingly old-fashioned.

Rachael Stirling, John Lithgow

But that is exactly why Giant cuts so deep. By refusing the comfort of historical distance, by denying us moral superiority, it forces recognition that the undercurrent is not historical but ongoing. The same networks that protected Dahl continue shielding cultural figures whose bigotry we have learned to rationalize more efficiently.

This production demands a Broadway transfer, not merely because Lithgow deserves another Tony (though he absolutely does), but because American audiences need this conversation. We have spent so much time debating cancel culture and artistic freedom that we forgot to examine the quieter machinery of institutional protection, the polite dinner conversations where terrible ideas circulate like expensive wine.

John Lithgow and Aya Cash

Rosenblatt offers no easy answers, and that is what makes his play so valuable. Easy answers belong in children’s literature, not in serious examinations of those who create it. Instead, he provides something more unsettling: a clear view of how hatred perpetuates itself through charm, talent, and willful institutional blindness.

Walking out of the theater, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d witnessed something necessary. The evening in London felt different, sharper somehow. Maybe that discomfort is exactly what we need right now. Not art that soothes, but art that refuses to let us look away from what we’ve been willing to ignore for the sake of a good story.

Tessa Bonham Jones is the sassy housekeeper, Hallie

In an age when antisemitism has returned with a vengeance, when literary giants topple monthly, when beloved childhood classics carry increasingly visible stains, Giant arrives as both warning and method. It shows how excavation might proceed without destroying everything in the rubble, how accountability might coexist with complexity. Some conversations cannot be postponed forever. The courage to begin this one properly has finally materialized, and it speaks with Lithgow’s deceptively gentle voice.

photos by Johan Persson

John Lithgow

Giant
Royal Court Theatre Production
Harold Pinter Theatre, London; 796 seats
2 hours, 20 minutes
from 21 July, the role of Felicity Crosland will be played by Beth Eyre
ends on 2 August, 2025
for tickets, visit Giant