Here in one evening is the case for the stage. An incendiary subject, an extraordinary debut play, a fleet production, top-notch acting. Everything on the wing.
At the centre of Mark Rosenblatt’s towers John Lithgow, magnificent as Roald Dahl: impassioned and soured, mischievous and bullying. Tall and stooped, his long face a magic lantern over which flits moues and pursings and winces, he pronounces the name of his American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) with the “Girooooux” contemptuously extended, as if it were a French affectation. In the course of the play he becomes terrifying, yet the monstrousness is inflected by the keen affection of his no-flies future wife: brings poised intelligence – askance but not arch – to a finely written part.
The occasion of the play is real: a 1983 book review by Dahl in which condemnation of the actions of Israeli forces during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon slithered into racial condemnation. The circumstances are imagined: a meeting with his real-life British publisher and a fictional representative of FSG, Jessie Stone, in which the two publishers, both Jewish, try to persuade Dahl to deny any antisemitism and avoid bad publicity as his new book appears. The argument is intense, precise: with Dahl describing the massacre in Beirut; as Stone, shimmering between nervy and bold, pleading the distinction between the government and the people of Israel.
The closing moments are rattlesnake-shocking. Dahl, having seemed to .