It is one thing to set about writing your first play. It is quite another to find yourself on the end of a phone call from the director Nicholas Hytner saying that he not only wants to direct it but is suggesting that John Lithgow should be its star. “It was an amazing, transformative moment,” admits theatre director and now playwright Mark Rosenblatt.
The call happened in late December 2022. Hytner was responding to Rosenblatt’s first draft of , a play about the much-loved children’s author and self-confessed antisemite Roald Dahl which starts previewing today. Rosenblatt first approached Hytner about it in 2018, though not as a playwright.
Stellar cast: Romola Garai, Rachael Stirling, John Lithgow and Elliot Levey in rehearsal for Giant (c) Manuel Harlan “I was just looking to find a producer who might house the project and help develop it,” says Rosenblatt. With him as director? “Yes. I had no ambition to write a play.
I had never even thought about writing a play. Playwriting seems to me – and still does – like one hell of a thing to try to hold an audience’s attention through language.” But rewinding back to that call.
“I was in the top floor of the house [in East Finchley] in the spare room/office. My wife was with our little baby downstairs waiting because she knew that I was going to be on the phone with him. I thought he was just gonna politely let me down.
I remember going downstairs to tell my wife and we both just lay down.” A now fully u.