'Giant' review — John Lithgow gives a career-best performance in this blisteringly topical colossus of a play

Read our review of Mark Rosenblatt's Olivier Award-winning drama Giant, now in performances at the Harold Pinter Theatre to 2 August.

A big play has got bigger still in the West End upgrade of Giant, which arrives for a commercial run bearing three Olivier Awards, Best Play included, and, in keeping with its title, announces itself as a colossus.

I admired director-turned-author Mark Rosenblatt’s playwriting debut upon its Royal Court premiere last autumn. But I wasn’t prepared for the seismic jolt that Nicholas Hytner’s production now delivers. The drama, set 40 years ago but blisteringly topical to our times now, has been seasoned by the deepening of John Lithgow’s altogether astonishing performance as Roald Dahl and the terrific addition to the cast of the American actress Aya Cash, taking over from Romola Garai as an adversary of considerable proportions and power.

It's 1983, and we're in the largely sedentary confines of Dahl’s new Buckinghamshire home, to which the legendary children’s book writer has moved with his second wife-to-be, Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling). The house is a work-in-progress in Bob Crowley’s design, as one verbal grenade after another gets detonated across the dining table.

While his New Zealand chef Hallie (Tessa Bonham Jones) buzzes agreeably about proffering sorbet, Dahl fields two guests to perform damage limitation. Dahl, it seems, has penned a book review in which he has protested the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, his argument widening out from anger at this military incursion to a larger broadside against all Jews.

Retract his assertions or watch book sales tank – or so Dahl is advised by two very different emissaries from the publishing world. Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey, who, like Lithgow, received his own Olivier trophy last month) disappears to play tennis with a policeman on hand to keep watch, reappearing to encourage Dahl to agree to an interview with the Mail on Sunday so as to bring calm to the gathering storm.

But Rosenblatt’s ace in the hole is the fictional American sales executive, Cash’s Jessica Stone, who has flown in directly from America so as to force an apology of her own, only for her story to be itself complicated in ways that lead to an ideological tennis match of the first order. New to the part, and to the London stage, screen name Cash is a revelation.

The play reverberates on multiple levels without ever devolving into a thinly veiled screed. Indeed, amidst a time of hardening polarities fuelled by the doctrinaire climate afoot online, Giant is quasi-miraculous in its embrace of sometimes self-contradictory points of view.

Dahl, for instance, has been reviled for antisemitism, and it is shocking to be reminded of his remarks to the New Statesman that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on [the Jews] for no reason”. But Giant simultaneously reveals the formidably tall and tetchy brainiac as “a broken boy in giant’s clothing” whose irascibility, and worse, was very possibly a belligerent defence against a life marked by illness and loss. “I know pain, I do,” Dahl says, which allows a career-best Lithgow to hint at the man beneath the rhetorically unforgiving monster.

The play asks whether an artist can necessarily be defined by his art, albeit several decades before cancel culture decided such matters for us. Much is made of the possibly encoded Jewish critique afoot in his new book, The Witches, just as the separate issue of boycotts – don’t buy Israeli avocados! – prompts the perfectly reasonable question from Hallie: “Does the avocado know it’s Israeli?”

The play finds comedy amidst psychic carnage, compassion where lesser talents would locate only disdain. "Who are you?" this mighty play asks near its close, and that most basic question about humankind is sure to haunt all of us as we make our way home.

Giant is at the Harold Pinter Theatre to 2 August. Book Giant tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Johan Persson