Giant takes place on a scorching summer’s day in 1983, in an elegant, ramshackle English country home. Roald Dahl, the world-famous children’s author, is in a terrible mood. His body is wracked by pain, his new book, The Witches, is about to be released, and a public outcry about his recent book review—a coruscating critique of Israel’s siege of Beirut the year before, melded with antisemitic stereotypes—hangs in the air.
His fiancée and British Jewish publisher bob and weave around Dahl’s agile, capricious, turbulent energy. When a more junior, female representative from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, his New York publisher, also Jewish, arrives to help coax an apology from their star author, the house slowly, unwittingly transforms into an explosive battleground.
Dahl, at first the provoker, becomes the provoked, confronted by his American guest with hard truths about his review and the distinctions between meaningful discourse and vicious prejudice. Back against the wall, Dahl must decide—to apologize or not. His final decision—a spectacularly antisemitic double-down—is a matter of public record. Giant imagines the path that took this man to the destructive, hubristic decision that still taints his legacy.
Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant is powerful not because it denounces antisemitism, but because it understands how antisemitism survives. Most plays about prejudice comfort the audience with clarity. They reassure us that we would have recognized it immediately. Giant offers no such reassurance.
The play treats antisemitism not as a glitch in an otherwise civilized person, but as an ideology that can become fully integrated into someone’s worldview and self-image. Dahl sees himself through the rose-tinted lens of honor, chivalry even—an RAF pilot in the war, a man of unimpeachable integrity, a vanquisher of fascist evil. Giant shows how such a person can sincerely believe themselves principled, rational and courageous while simultaneously expressing openly antisemitic ideas. That’s far more disturbing—and arguably more truthful.
The play examines antisemitism not as ignorance, but as certainty. Dahl does not speak like a man searching for truth; he speaks like a man convinced that his intelligence exempts him from scrutiny. The play understands that prejudice often survives through vanity—through the seductive belief that one’s ideas are more powerful or more insightful than others’.
This is where the play becomes genuinely dangerous in the best sense of the word. It implicates not only the speaker, but the listeners around him. The friends who rationalize. The colleagues who deflect. The admirers who separate the art from the artist. Giant reveals antisemitism as a social choreography sustained by silence, accommodation and prestige.
And yet the play never becomes didactic. It trusts the audience enough to let discomfort do the work. There are no speeches engineered to release applause. No easy redemption. No sentimental cleansing. Instead, the audience is left with the far more difficult task of recognizing how charisma can anesthetize moral judgment.
That may be the play’s greatest achievement as a tool against antisemitism. It does not merely condemn hatred; it studies its elegance, its intelligence, its fluency and therefore its persistence. In doing so, it dismantles the comforting fantasy that culture itself is a protection against bigotry. Giant understands something essential and terrifying: great artists are not incapable of prejudice any more than brilliant scientists or clear-sighted politicians. Instead, often their greatness gives their prejudice a greater reach.
The result is not simply a play about Roald Dahl. It is a play about the seductions of certainty, the corruptions of fame and the eternal human temptation to confuse provocation with truth. That is why the audience leaves arguing. And that is why the play matters today.
