Giant: John Lithgow is mesmerising as Roald Dahl in this summer smash
After a sell-out run at the Royal Court, and with three Olivier awards to its name, Giant strides into the West End looking like an unslayable hit, its relevance to the incendiary international moment, Israel/ Gaza-wise, undimmed. Still, the issue facing the playwriting debut from director Mark Rosenblatt – about Roald Dahl and the anti-Semitism storm that engulfed him in 1983 – is whether it can now live up to insanely high expectations.
Led by a career-best performance from John Lithgow, Nicholas Hytner's superbly acted production doesn't make insistent early attempts to woo us. The setting, Gipsy House – the waspish Dahl's nest in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire – is an unprepossessing spectacle of dust-sheets and ceiling supports. And the opening chatter finds the author preoccupied with, and pernickety about, the proofs for The Witches – dispensing aggrieved barbs about the illustrations by Quentin Blake. Lithgow, looking not unlike a Blake illustration himself, with his angular, pinched, slanting frame, presents the impish storyteller on drolly entertaining form, but barely theatrically so. He mutters, while Elliot Levey as Dahl's British publisher Tom Maschler does a good impression of a man who'd rather be elsewhere (we're told he has a tennis-match date with Ian McEwan).
But as the reputational crisis that Maschler is venturing to broach rears to the fore, with the flustered arrival of his American counterpart (the fictional character of Jessie Stone), the piece gains the inexorable, transfixing momentum of, well, a giant peach hurtling downhill.
The demand from team Dahl sounds reasonable – a politic apology for the upset caused by his 'off-piste' diatribe about Israel in an article for the Literary Review (which has resulted in death-threats and a copper outside). But Dahl won't comply, presenting his defiance as a badge of integrity in the face of cynical self-interest. Maschler, Jewish himself, bends over backwards to placate Dahl's ego, pragmatic to a fault. Stone, also Jewish, breaks ranks to fulminate against the prejudice implicit in the article and bubbling away too in the cauldron of his conversation.
Even if there's a blunt dramatic convenience to this character holding the not-so-lovable eccentric to account, especially in relation to a construed anti-Semitic subtext to The Witches, what remains hugely impressive about Giant is its complex plethora of thought-provoking little details.
We may admire Stone's flinty resolve (American actress Aya Cash taking over, capably, from Romola Garai), but she's still inclined to separate the artist from his art in deference to her learning disabled son's reading needs, her stance complicated further by Dahl's compassion for the boy, and for her. And Lithgow's multi-faceted portrait keeps our sympathies shifting to the unpalatable end: his insouciance and incorrigible wit beguiling, his humanitarian concern persuasive, his prejudice bound up with his self-sabotaging personality type. Rachael Stirling remains pitch-perfect as his warily, almost wearily supportive partner Felicity, with Tessa Bonham Jones and Richard Hope completing the cast as the astute house-help and bluntly sage handyman.
They each get their moment to shine – and deserve to bask in a by turns lightly enjoyable and powerfully serious-minded summer smash.
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