‘Giant’ Broadway Review: John Lithgow Delivers A Towering Performance

The ferocity of John Lithgow‘s explosive performance as Roald Dahl – the children’s author as reviled by some as he was beloved by others – seems to show itself right from the start of Mark Rosenblatt’s extraordinary play Giant, opening on Broadway tonight. Our first glimpse of Lithgow’s Dahl catches the writer in full curmudgeon mode as he sits, stews and grouses over the latest galleys of his upcoming book The Witches.

But even at Dahl’s grouchiest in these early scenes, Lithgow barely hints at the vitriol and monstrousness to come when the famed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox, among so many others, fully unleashes the hate, rot and bigotry eating him alive. And when that comes, no one will be spared.

Lithgow’s remarkable Olivier Award-winning performance – at this point in the far-from-over Broadway season he and Every Brilliant Thing‘s Daniel Radcliffe seem headed for a showdown – is a terrifically nuanced affair, as indeed are Rosenblatt’s play and the note-perfect direction of Nicholas Hytner. Any cast of costars would be deemed successful merely for holding its own, and this one does so much more than that. Giant, thrilling and abrasive, is full of rewards.

Based on a true event from Dahl’s life, Giant takes place in 1983, though it could have been yesterday. Set entirely in the shambolic mess of the living room in a house under top-to-bottom renovation – excellently presented in Bob Crowley’s realistic design of scattered ladders, wall patches and stacked boxes – Giant cleverly uses the visual disorder as a reflection of the personal chaos Dahl has willfully set in motion with the publication of an antisemitic broadside barely disguised as a book review. (Crowley’s costume design is equally on point, from Dahl’s rumpled writer-wear to the casual silk-blouse-and-sneakers chic of his sophisticated society fiancée).

In the review (of Tony Clifton’s God Cried), Dahl wrote that the United States is “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” and, decrying Israel’s 1982 invasion and bombing of Lebanon, asked whether Israel, like Nazi Germany, must “be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world.”

The immediate international backlash – newspapers condemned him, booksellers threatened boycotts – raised questions of other suggestions of bigotry in Dahl’s work. In the play, he concedes his error in depicting Willy Wonka’s Ooompa-Loompas as African (a portrayal not, of course, included in the film adaptations), but is outraged when an emissary from his publishing company suggests that descriptions of the witches in his upcoming book bear an unsettling similarity to loathsome age-old images in antisemitic propaganda.

So that’s the set-up of Giant, and what follows is a bracingly direct examination of motives, prejudices, censorship and what today would be called political correctness and cancel culture.

Rosenblatt presents the issues with expert modulation, only rarely – very rarely – sliding just a bit too close to a schematic one side vs. the other format. Instead, he and director Hytner allow the arguments and contentions to flow from character, sometimes with a brazen articulation, sometimes with a stuttering reluctance, but always a shrewd candor, polite manners be damned.

The bullying, quick-witted Dahl – sometimes he brings to mind a more sadistic, cutthroat version of the great Monty Woolley’s acerbic critic Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came To Dinner – is typically placated (coddled might be too strong a word, but not by much) by his fiancée of 11 years Felicity “Liccy” Crosland (Rachael Stirling) and his British publisher Tom Maschler (Elliott Levey).

In the play, a couple passing references are made to “Patricia,” that being Dahl’s ex-wife, Patricia Neal, whom the author abandoned for Crosland after a series of unthinkable tragedies, including Neal’s career-threatening brain aneurysms, a devastating car accident that injured their infant son and the measles-related death of their seven-year-old daughter).

At one point, Lithgow’s Dahl refers to Neal as a “vegetable.” Kind, he is not.

Summoned by both Maschler and Crosland to do a bit of crisis management is Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), a young, New York-based publishing executive tasked by her boss with convincing Dahl to submit to a damage-control press interview and apologize for his comments. Maschler is all for that, of course, since book sales are at risk otherwise, and Crosland is terrified by the violent threats being made against both herself and Dahl (a police officer has been stationed on their Buckinghamshire estate for protection).

Stone might seem, at first, an appropriate bearer of, if not bad news, then at least uncomfortable truths. She’s young and enthusiastic and in thrall to her great childhood idol, but Dahl, a true shark, smells blood in the water.

“Stone?,” he asks upon meeting his guest. “Was that Stein once?” Within seconds, he’s berating the “tiny weeny progressives” of the New Israel Fund and wondering aloud if Stone, too, might belong to the “tiny crazy gang of peace-loving bleeding-heart hippies.”

Initially remaining stoic, or perhaps just intimidated, during such personal intrusions, Stone begins to loose her cool under the persistent needling and baiting. Dahl dismisses her concerns over a possible boycott of his books by American librarians (“Satan’s Spinster Army,” he spews), and he makes odious references to an American Jewish bookseller who survived the Holocaust. If there’s any doubt what he’s getting at, he makes it clear when in the presence of Stone, he loudly hisses to Maschler, “Whatever I say, it won’t be enough. Ask her! She knows them. She is them.”

As we’ve been waiting for Stone to match Dahl’s intensity if not his cruelty, we welcome her occasional victories as this luncheon devolves into Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? nastiness, complete with references to unseen children whose tragedies haunt and distort the hearts of their parents. There are moments of grace and connection – Dahl turns comforting when he susses out a family sadness that he shares with the woman from New York, and he seems to have genuine affection for both his fiancee and an elderly gardener long in his employ – but such vulnerabilities can’t do much to lessen our satisfaction when Stone finally says what we’ve all been thinking: “You’re a belligerent, nasty child. And these threats and cruelties… a child’s. It’s the gift of your work, but the curse of your life.” He is, she says, “a broken boy in giant’s clothing” who picks the legs off ants and sets the creatures afire.

Cash delivers Stone’s lines with absolute conviction, whether the character is, by turns, equivocating, peace-making, manipulating, weeping or striking back. Whenever we think Stone has been exposed as a fraud or a weak-thinker or, at the very least, no match for her antagonist, Cash snaps us back to the reality of the situation: This woman, this Jewish mother of a child we’d now call special needs, has a spine that just might be made of steel, and a strength that won’t crumble in the face of a bully.

Excellent too are Stirling as the long-suffering fiancee – her Liccy, like Stone, is no pushover, and what at times seems to the behavior of an enabler and overindulgent coddler is in fact something deeper, if not always wiser.

As the British (and Jewish) publisher, Levey fully conveys the intricacies of mixed motives, divided loyalties and fierce, self-protective independence. We’re never quite sure where his Tom stands, but somehow sense that Levey knows full well. It’s a fascinating performance.

So too is Stella Everett’s house servant Hallie, a youthful and buoyant presence who seems to possess genuine affection for Dahl, refusing, despite his demands, to be drawn into the arguments and debates he initiates. But watch Everett’s face when the scales start to fall, and just try not to be reminded of Anthony Hopkin’s magisterial performance in The Remains of the Day.

Still, Giant is, first and last, Lithgow’s show. He gives a tour de force performance that nails every slight shift in mood and tone, from, as Stone says, “broken boy” to the hateful creep who almost playfully suggests that Hitler got some things right. When the lights first come up on the stage, Lithgow is seated at a table, and it isn’t until he soon stands up that we notice, possibly for the first time ever, just how tall this actor is, even as his body contorts and bends to register the many physical infirmities that twisted the aging Dahl’s body as surely and grotesquely as his hatreds warped his psyche. He’s a doomed, rage-filled and terrified man, and Lithgow never lets us forget it. And never lets us forgive him.

Title: Giant
Venue: Broadway’s Music Box Theater
Written By: Mark Rosenblatt
Directed By: Nicholas Hytner
Cast: John Lithgow, Aya Cash, Elliot Levey, Rachael Stirling, Stella Everett, David Manis
Running Time: 2 hr 20 min (including intermission)