Mick Hartley

Melanie Phillips in the Times wonders how many of the London audience for Giant, the play about Roald Dahl's antisemitism, are in fact on Dahl's side.

Last week I finally got to see Giant, the much-acclaimed play by Mark Rosenblatt about the antisemitism of the children’s author Roald Dahl. It’s superbly written and magnificently acted. But I found watching it in a London theatre deeply uncomfortable.

The audience laughed sympathetically at the on-stage Dahl putting down the Jewish woman who objects to his rampant Jew-hatred. Was the audience actually nodding along to what he was saying? For some of his vile lines are what British Jews are now hearing as a matter of unexceptional routine.

The play deals with the furore in 1983 after Dahl published a savage article in the Literary Review about Israel’s war in Lebanon. “Never before in the history of man,” he wrote, “has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”

That’s precisely the vicious claim that has caused many British Jews today to feel that their country has turned into a nightmarish alternative universe. After the Hamas-led atrocities against Israelis on October 7, 2023, many switched rapidly from pitying the victims of genocidal aggression to portraying them as barbarous murderers for defending themselves against it.

In the play, the publisher Tom Maschler presents Dahl’s grotesque antisemitism as moral because it’s wrapped up in compassion for the Palestinians. That’s precisely the gaslighting to which British Jews are today being subjected.

Given the extraordinary explosion of Jew hatred in the UK since the October 7th massacre, it's highly likely that there are many who not only sympathise with Dahl, but who agree with him.

In the play, Dahl says he’s antisemitic because there are Jews in England who support Zionism. The suggestion is that they therefore deserve to be loathed. Did the audience quietly agree? Given how so many appear to have gone through the looking-glass over Israel, this sickening possibility was no theatrical illusion. It was all too likely to be true.