Curtain raiser: I’d never seen Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first tragedy, performed onstage. I have seen Julie Taymor’s film Titus, with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange, but I mostly remember it from the droll Vincent Price vehicle Theater of Blood, where Price’s homicidal thespian bakes critic Robert Morley’s beloved poodles into a pie and serves them up. I think someone at Red Bull Theater recalled it fondly, too, maybe director Jesse Berger, star Patrick Page, or costume designer Emily Rebholz; at the end Page, a delightfully Price-like actor, dons a chef’s outfit as in the film and goes to town, precipitating the final outrages as “What a Wonderful World” plays. (I think they might have sat down with Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, too, a stylishly designed revenge saga.) Absent much poetry there’s not too much to it besides escalating power plays reflecting our own cage-match politics (Titus’ daughter suffers the worst indignities) but it made for a bloody good time. (What the kids seated near me made of it I haven’t a clue.)
Giant, however, slashes. To set the scene for the main event this time I must mention that at the same age I was watching Vincent Price movies I was consuming the books and stories of Roald Dahl, a cornerstone of many a childhood. Mark Rosenblatt’s play, an Olivier winner on the West End last year that’s now at the Music Box, finds the beloved author in his not-quite-finished house struggling with The Witches (1983), sparring with his fiancee Liccy and British publisher Tom Maschler, and generally performing the part of the great man of letters as only a great man of the theater as John Lithgow can. (Like Dahl he’s a BFG, filling the room when he stands.) But there’s a chill in the air, attributable not to the weather (it’s summer) or Dahl’s fussing about but from reports of a prowler. He’s made the news, and not in a good way–a critique he’s written for the Literary Review about a photo book concerning Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a review steeped in antisemitic vitriol, is causing headaches at home and “across the pond.” Liccy (Rachael Stirling) and Tom (Elliot Levey) are trying to control the damage, but both are in too deep with Dahl to sway him toward reasonableness, much less a public apology. (He and Liccy had a long affair while he was married to the actress Patricia Neal, a fraught union recently ended, and Tom, who came up with the Booker Prize, is constantly calibrating art and commerce with his star client, notwithstanding his own Jewish heritage.)
Into this unsettled situation comes Jessie Stone (Aya Cash, excellent), a young, relatively green sales director of Dahl’s US publisher, which has been fielding complaints. She hasn’t been briefed on how to manage Dahl’s moods and temperament but at first it’s ok; he’s happy to sign an autograph for her son, which brings out his paternal side. He loves children, and prides himself on speaking their language of disgust and revulsion (I reciprocated his indulgence, a wellspring of delight–and controversy over appropriateness–that has carried on into the era of Timothée Chalamet and Netflix adaptations). But he’s horrified by the death of Lebanese children at the hands of the Israelis–isn’t Stone…or is it “Stein”? And so begins a war of words, a war that Stone , fiery in her red skirt, wages with Dahl’s own words, taken verbatim from his review. They’re ugly, and I flinched throughout her painful recitation. What I knew of this episode was about as much as Wiki told me, and that isn’t much. (This is more illuminating.)
Act I concludes on a note of what I call “mic drop theater,” where no one in the audience dares to say a word. The second act contrives to bring Stone (a fictitious character) back to Dahl’s dining room table, which by this point is about as inviting as Titus Andronicus’. We expect some sort of comeuppance, or meeting of the minds, or understanding. (Some, not Rosenblatt, who wrote a portrait of the author, conjecture that the traumatic brain injury he suffered during World War II, which he said released his creativity, also loosed his demons.) There is a bit of relief. But only a bit, as Dahl, for whom antisemitism is a feature and not a bug, wallows in what goes well beyond performative hatred. In truth the play, galvanizing though it is, succumbs to repetition as it builds to a harrowing final scene, a telephone interview with a journalist also repeated verbatim. You’ll hang onto to every horrible word that Lithgow utters–a problem with Nicholas Hytner’s otherwise assured direction, as you’re bound to miss most of the clarifying reaction from Dahl’s maid Hallie (Stella Everett), who is positioned elsewhere in the room.
Decades after his death Dahl’s family apologized for these actions, which by then were obscured by the passage of time. Giant brings them front and center on Bob Crowley’s haunted set as arguments over artists and their art, never easy to resolve, are further amplified in the clanging corridors of social media. (The 80-year-old Lithgow, who loves his monsters, is working on a Harry Potter show, angering fans who admire his gentler Oscar-nominated performance in The World According to Garp and detest author J.K. Rowling’s statements on transgenderism.) It’s a difficult play to absorb, and to ponder, in the wake of October 7 and the Mideast conflagration. I’m glad Dahl’s books remain and that he’s gone; I shudder to think of him Zooming with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, trading barbs and conspiracy theories about the Jews.
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