Giant's triumph at the Oliviers proves theatre is finally taking anti-Semitism seriously

Yahoo

07-04-2025

The decision to hand the hugely prestigious Olivier award for Best New Play to Mark Rosenblatt for Giant, together with two other Oliviers (John Lithgow and Elliot Levey taking Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor), isn't just a mightily deserved win for the director turned playwright, and the players concerned. It's a sign that British theatre is emphatically taking anti-Semitism seriously – and with mainstream intent – which is its vital duty in these febrile times.
The work, which premiered last autumn at a resurgent Royal Court (and is about to open in the West End), stars American acting giant Lithgow, 79, as Roald Dahl, and is set in 1983, at an imagined crisis meeting with publisher Tom Maschler (Levey) and a fictitious US sales director Jessie Stone (Romola Garai). The upset follows the fierce anti-Israeli (and anti-Jewish) criticisms made by the avidly read children's author in a review of God Cried – a book recounting the 1982 siege of Beirut by the Israeli army.
The underlying triumph of Nicholas Hytner's production is to assert that at a time of polarised views and unyielding agendas, theatre is the perfect space to explore complex, even incendiary subject-matter with nuance and subtlety, opening up debate, not rail-roading it. It hasn't felt like that of late – heavy-handedness and one-sidedness have, too often, been the order of the day. The clamour to see Giant reflects ardent interest in the topic and a yen for sophisticated drama.
The boon but also the risk was that it landed in a year in which the issue of anti-Semitism, and the discourse around Israel, reached fever-pitch. Having grown out of Rosenblatt's concern about the politics, and prejudices, of Corbyn's Labour ('the blurring of language in the discussion around Israel and Judaism..,'), it got the green-light for production two days before the October 7 attacks.
'It's a play full of delicate sensitivities, and it met the world at the most sensitive and delicate of moments,' said Rosenblatt when accepting two Critics Circle awards the other week. In that context, its line-by-line mixture of light and shade seem even more like a counter-blast to our antagonised, black-and-white times.
What's heartening about Giant is that its inescapable topicality grows out of its fidelity to its material. It's the polar opposite of the crass gesture that saw a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream pulled at the Royal Exchange in Manchester last year as a consequence of an activist-minded directorial decision to deploy a 'Free Palestine' slogan in the set. Rosenblatt brought much graft and craft to his subject; alongside imagination, reams of research and his own interviews.
Rosenblatt crucially never editorialises, leaving it to the audience to be swayed in their sympathies. Some of Dahl's outrage about Israeli actions is, at the least, impassioned and eloquent. His impish contempt for 'cancel culture' avant la lettre even has quite an up-to-the-moment aura of the 'free speech warrior' about it. Only at the end, when he gets on the phone to speak to the New Statesman journalist Michael Coren, and we hear the oldest hatred conveyed loud and clear, does he become emetically indefensible.
Coincidentally, the Oliviers were further dominated this year by three wins, including Best Musical Revival, for an exceptional staging of Fiddler on the Roof at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, directed by Jordan Fein, which had a record-breaking 13 nominations. Obviously this is a big crowd-pleaser (soon to transfer to the Barbican) with some of the best tunes (If I Were a Rich Man, Tradition) in the history of musical theatre. Yet, at a time of rising anti-Semitism, the decision to revive it carries an inescapable significance.
Not that Fein's production labours any topical points. Apparently he banned talk of politics from the rehearsal space and any contemporary parallels are made with a sleight of hand. Rather we get due moments of terrific musical uplift, while Fein vividly lays bare the hardship of life in the shtetl, and the brutality of the Russian pogroms that set in train mass emigration at the start of the 20th century.
There's clearly something in the air – theatre as a safety-valve for expressing alarm about cycles of history, the direction of travel. As SOLT (the Society of London Theatre) declared this week, citing mighty attendances in the West End (even outstripping, by far, Premier League matches), investment needs to happen across the sector to ensure it shines so brightly at the top (the three wins for the hit musical of Benjamin Button are dazzling vindications of the value of the Fringe). Equally, the West End is a powerhouse like no other because it answers a crucial need to gather and reflect as a society – and the all-new Giant, alongside the new-minted Fiddler, illustrate this. Brilliantly.
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (Ambassadors Theatre)
Oedipus (Wyndham's Theatre)
Elliot Levey for Giant
Romola Garai for The Years
Gabriella Slade for Starlight Express
Tom Scutt for Fiddler On The Roof
Lesley Manville for Oedipus at Wyndham's Theatre
John Lithgow for Giant
Allan Clayton for Festen
Festen (The Royal Opera at Royal Opera House)
Eline Arbo for The Years at Almeida Theatre & Harold Pinter Theatre
Boys On The Verge Of Tears by Sam Grabiner at Soho Theatre
Giant by Mark Rosenblatt (Jerwood Theatre Downstairs at Royal Court Theatre)
Titanique by Tye Blue, Marla Mindelle & Constantine Rousouli (Criterion Theatre)
Christopher Wheeldon for MJ The Musical
Brainiac Live (Marylebone Theatre)
Eva Yerbabuena for Yerbagüena
Assembly Hall by Kidd Pivot, Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young (Sadler's Wells)
Darren Clark and Mark Aspinall, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
Fiddler On The Roof, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre
Paule Constable & Ben Jacobs for Oliver!
Nick Lidster for Fiddler On The Roof
Maimuna Memon for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet Of 1812
Layton Williams for Titanique
John Dagleish for The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
Imelda Staunton for Hello, Dolly!
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