How a first-time playwright created a giant hit

Telegraph

29-04-2025

At this month's Olivier Awards, Mark Rosenblatt became the first debut writer to win Best New Play since 2012, when John Hodge's Collaborators, staged at the National Theatre, picked up the gong.
Yet this coveted prize has not gone to some precocious scribe: Rosenblatt is 47 and has spent his entire career as a director, mostly freelancing at venues including Shakespeare's Globe and the National. But that is not to take away from his success: Giant – in which Roald Dahl wrestles with the potentially career-threatening fallout of his very public anti-Semitism – has been a huge success. The towering American actor John Lithgow (who plays Dahl) and Elliot Levey (who plays his publisher, Tom Maschler) also won Oliviers and, after a sold-out run at a resurgent Royal Court last autumn, Giant is now opening in the West End.
Giant is set at Gipsy House, Dahl's Great Missenden home, in the summer of 1983 – which was, as Rosenblatt writes in his note on the play text, 'a particularly challenging season to be (or be near) Roald Dahl'. He was recently divorced from Patricia Neal, the Hollywood actress, enduring a disruptive renovation of his home and physically creaking but near the peak of his powers as a children's writer: The BFG had been published the previous year to great acclaim.
All of this is overshadowed by Dahl's review of a book, chronicling the siege of Beirut in the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war, in which he wrote of Jews that 'never before in the history of man has a race of people switched rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers'. He railed against the apparent global dominance of 'Jewish financial institutions' and 'American Jewish bankers', while also asking if Jews around the world 'have the guts' to criticise Israeli actions.
Rosenblatt's path to Gipsy House was prompted by a similarly cantankerous old man with forthright views: Jeremy Corbyn. When Labour was rocked by frequent accusations of anti-Semitism under its former leader, Rosenblatt sought a way to explore how criticism of Israel often blurs into prejudice against Jewish people. 'As a British Jew, I found hearing those things very shocking,' he says. 'As a director, I thought it would be interesting to see if there was a way of dramatising it,' he tells me.
He remembered reading about Dahl's anti-Semitism and thought that could be a way in, but had no intention of writing the play himself: 'plays felt like another person's gift'.
Rosenblatt's gift, since he graduated with an Oxford English degree, has been directing. He won an award for young directors in 1999 with his adaptation of The Dybbuk by the Russian S An-sky, then set up Dumfounded Theatre to revive forgotten classics, such as CP Taylor's Bread and Butter. From 2013-16 worked full-time as associate director at Leeds Playhouse.
Rosenblatt, who has flecks of grey creeping into his black beard and a habit of gesticulating a lot when he talks, tells me that he only decided to write Giant after a meeting with Nicholas Hytner. He had worked for Hytner during his tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre and asked for advice about who might be suitable to write the play about Dahl he had in his head. Hytner suggested he do it himself.
Then came the pandemic, which gave Rosenblatt the chance to write at his kitchen table. He says that he spent a couple of years working intensively on his own and, from the end of 2022, Hytner was 'very, very involved, as directors are, in noting it and giving me suggestions and feedback and redrafts'.
The Royal Court may have seemed an unlikely theatre for the play's premiere run given its own much-publicised accusations of anti-Semitism: ranging from Ken Loach's Perdition in 1987 to Rare Earth Mettle in 2021, which included a megalomaniacal billionaire named Hershel Fink that critics said put forward anti-Semitic tropes, and for which the Court publicly apologised.Rosenblatt says that he 'never really discussed the past' with the Court's new director, David Byrne, and was thrilled to have his play put on at a 'powerhouse of new writing'.
Rosenblatt got word that Giant was going to be programmed at the Royal Court on October 5, 2023 – just two days before Hamas terrorists launched their attack on Israel that left almost 1,200 dead and around 250 more taken hostage. Then came the war in Gaza. During previews, Israel bombarded Lebanon in an attempt to oust Hezbollah. All of a sudden, there was added relevance to the play.
There was no question in Rosenblatt's mind about not going ahead with the production; 'My only thought was, would the Royal Court – like any theatre – wobble in any way about the decision, given what was happening in the world, the sensitivity of it? And they were unerring.'
In polarising times, Giant is unusual for its nuanced portrayal of a character like the unapologetically anti-Semitic Dahl. 'Roald Dahl is, for everything that is difficult about the things that he said and did in that time, also a very charismatic, funny, quite mesmerising character,' says Rosenblatt. 'Even the outrageous stuff is, at times, kind of funny and holds people in the story.'
The playwright was determined to channel Dahl's duality, rather than merely excoriate him. 'He's got a gleeful fun, he's very charming. He uses his charm to disguise his cruelty. He uses his cruelty to cover his vulnerability too,' says Rosenblatt. 'I knew that if it was just a hatchet job on a famous writer, it would be very singular and boring after 10 minutes.'
Dahl is an emotive character for many: 'part of the cultural wallpaper of our lives', as Rosenblatt describes it. 'He has informed so many childhoods. Then what do you do? You don't want to share that with your children? I read his books to my kids, knowing who he was,' he says.
'I wouldn't read his books to my kids if they actually directly contained anti-Semitism, and I don't think they do.'
Though he has no wish to cancel Dahl, Rosenblatt says he does tweak some of his stories – 'I sometimes edit on the fly' – when he reads to his five-year-old son, because he feels uncomfortable with some of his characterisations. 'I will soften some of the adjectives when I'm reading it, but that's what I do in order to still have the opportunity to read these amazing stories to him.'
Are there any examples that spring to mind? 'I think there's some misogyny in [the depiction of] Mrs Twit and the way that she evolves as a person in the story. There's some quite binary thinking about people's looks and people's actions and their behaviour,' he says. 'Someone who isn't conventionally beautiful, that doesn't mean that in some way they think bad thoughts… I don't want my son, particularly, to go out into the world and think that someone who looks a certain way is, therefore, in some way a bad person.'
There is a neat circularity to Rosenblatt achieving such stellar success with a play about Dahl: his first memory of the theatre is going to a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Though he does not remember where or when this was, he vividly recalls the actor playing Willy Wonka telling Augustus Gloop on stage to 'turn your mic down' because it was malfunctioning.
'I must remember it because there's something about the illusion shattering in theatre that interests me,' Rosenblatt says. 'It's this very complex thing that can go wrong.' Thankfully, for Rosenblatt, nothing's gone wrong yet.