I could have gone to Trafalgar Square and watched speakers (among them some I admire) bare their conscience in the cause of Gaza. Instead, encouraged by good reviews (except for the dissenting Spectator) I went to the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End to see John Lithgow play the anti-Semitic Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt's debut work Giant. It was old-fashioned theatre with bare props and brainy dialogues—and a denouement reached through the volatility of ideas and the power of prejudice. On the eve of the publication of The Witches in America, Dahl is in trouble, at least from the perspective of his publisher, for the stink of anti-Semitism in a review he has written for an English journal. In Israel's attack on Lebanon in 1982, the ageing, petulant, condescending Dahl sees the strains of Hitlerism in Jews. Israel's military action is an occasion for the British writer to denounce the entire Jewish race. A sales executive from his American publisher and his English editor, joined by his live-in partner, ask him to withdraw the rant and apologise lest the forthcoming book be affected. Israel is a contention and Palestine is a cause here, and Dahl is too entrenched in his rage against Israel to be generous in accepting a different view that dilutes his idea of historical injustice. He talks himself to a dead-end from where he won't dare to retreat. Caught in that twilight zone between pathological rejection of a state and what he believes to be the moral obligation of someone who is so certain of what is right, Dahl can't allow anyone else in the room to save him. In the end, I couldn't help wondering: What does he hate most, the other view or the demon state born in his imagination? In the time of Gaza, a Dahl fretting and fuming in a moral cauldron on the stage doesn't help us choose our side. More than four decades after Lebanon, Giant makes us aware of the cruelty of choices.

John Lithgow

Farage’s Conservatism and Dahl’s anti-Semitism