Roald Dahl was a genius—and a shocking bigot
No magic potion or friendly giant can resolve this tension, as a new play shows
Perhaps, in the squeamish spirit of the times, the Royal Court Theatre in London should have put on two versions of “Giant”, a blistering new play about Roald Dahl—one that quoted his bigoted remarks about Jews, the other omitting them for propriety. As it is, the show is an unblinking study of a great author’s prejudice and its bearing on his art. Unlike Dahl’s zany children’s stories, with their noble heroes and appalling villains, this one offers no easy morals.
Some of his best friends were Jewish. At least, some of his publishers were. Set in 1983, the play imagines a lunch hosted by Dahl (played by John Lithgow) for his actual British editor, Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), and an invented American publishing executive (Romola Garai), both Jews. The playwright, Mark Rosenblatt, could not have known how eerily timely his premise would be.
In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon; in a real-life review of a book about the siege of Beirut, Dahl (pictured) vaulted the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. The Jews had revealed themselves as a race of “barbarous murderers”, he wrote. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity,” he added in an interview, cited on stage. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” The play shows Dahl’s high-minded arguments about the Middle East degenerating into the crudest calumnies. The Jews, he alleged, controlled the media and the American government.
The plot hinges on whether Dahl—also portrayed as cranky, chippy, venal and vain—will make a mollifying statement to mend his image before the release of “The Witches”. But implicitly it poses a wider question, faced by fans of every feted artist with disgraceful views or habits. Referring to a character’s child, the stage Dahl asks: “Can you no longer read my books to dear Archie?”
A wrinkle, in his case, is that the artist cannot be neatly sequestered from his art. As is noted in the play, the “child-snatching, money-printing devils” in “The Witches” have been seen by some as a collage of antisemitic slurs. Dahl insulted other groups, too. The Oompa-Loompas in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” were originally pygmies from the “African jungle”. Criticised by the NAACP and others, Dahl gave them white skin instead.
As audiences may recall, another furore blew up last year after his British publishers revised other bits of his books lest they cause offence. References to weight, appearance and sex were tweaked; words like “ugly” and “fat” were zapped. The row subsided on the news that the original texts would remain available. But the dappy initiative illuminated the clash at the heart of the play, between Dahl’s talent as a writer and failings as a man.
Dahl grasped two things that the bowdlerisers of his books overlooked. The first was about children’s stories. The best are more than a warm bath and a soft cuddle; they are a vicarious introduction to the world’s risks and woes. His other intuition was about children themselves. Though they get more leeway than grown-ups to whack each other and eat with their hands, some adults insist on thinking of them as harmless and pure. Dahl never forgot that they can be grubby little blighters. “Some children”, he says in the play, “are really quite odd.”
These insights fed a nastiness in his writing that is essential to its appeal. Dahl gleefully indulged young readers’ fascination with violence and bodily yuckiness. The roads to his happy endings are littered with squished and tortured baddies. As the Maschler character says, his stories let in the world’s cruelty, “but take you out the other side”.
Dahl died in 1990. The uncomfortable truth about him is not just that he was a glorious writer and reprehensible man. It is that these twin identities are not opposites but mirror images. The grotesqueries in his fiction are hilarious; but, dangerously, he reduced real people to caricatures too. The wordplay in his stories is delightful, but his devotion to verbal japes led to that glib reference to Hitler as a “stinker”. “The gift of your work”, a character tells him in “Giant”, is “the curse of your life”.
Even those parents who know and care about Dahl’s racism are unlikely to renounce his books. That would anyway punish their children rather than Dahl, whose antic imagination and outlandish plots will always be enchanting. At the same time, as this bracing play affirms, his vices are unignorable. In one of his stories, a magic potion or friendly giant might clear up this awkward tension. In real life, it is everlasting.
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