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A new Broadway play about Roald Dahl and his prejudice captures uncomfortable truths.
The malefactors in Roald Dahl’s fiction are easy to spot. “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face,” the author writes in The Twits. “And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.” Miss Trunchbull, the abusive headmistress of Matilda, is a “gigantic holy terror” with “an obstinate chin, a cruel mouth and small arrogant eyes.” Augustus Gloop, the greedy glutton of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is a “big fat boy” who is likened to a dog and a pig. In James and the Giant Peach, the protagonist is oppressed by his “enormously fat” Aunt Sponge, who resembles “soggy overboiled cabbage,” and the “bony” Aunt Spiker, with her “screeching voice and long wet narrow lips.” In Dahl’s children’s books, evil is self-evident and announces itself in crude, stereotypical terms.
Giant, a play about Dahl running on Broadway through June, is anything but childish. And although the celebrated writer might be construed as the villain of the production, he is nothing like the villains of his own work. The play dramatizes a debate between Dahl and his associates over a book review he published in 1983, which began with criticism of Israel’s recent military campaign in Lebanon but swerved into negative generalizations about “a race of people”—Jews. Dahl is pressed by his publisher to walk back some of his more incendiary assertions, but instead he doubles down, telling a dumbstruck journalist at the end of the play that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity” and that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” (Although the play itself is fiction based on true events, this exchange is genuine and reenacted verbatim.)
Giant could have taken the same approach to Dahl as Dahl took to his own characters, clearly telegraphing the author’s ills and reducing him to them. But as written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner, Giant doesn’t caricature its subject. Instead, the play does something much more difficult: It shows how Dahl excels at many things—including anti-Semitism.
As embodied by John Lithgow, Dahl is incisive, avuncular, irascible, acerbic, and always entertaining. He has deep compassion for the suffering of innocents, an irresistible sense of comic timing, and considered critiques of the state of Israel. He also engages in casual misogyny, narcissism, and anti-Semitism. He repeatedly casts Jews as cowards, claiming that he never saw any engaged in combat in World War II—more than 1 million in fact served in the Allied armies—and derides the Jewish victims of the Nazis as submissive in the face of their aggressors. By the end of the play, one understands why this otherwise impressive man was—according to his own daughter—once expelled from a social club that he’d complained had too many Jews in it.
By presenting Dahl in all his maddening and flawed humanity, Giant explores an uncomfortable truth: Bigots do not present themselves for easy identification as they do in children’s stories like Dahl’s. “There was such a courtesy and an intelligence in the way he framed his answers to me that it was very disarming,” Michael Coren, the journalist who elicited Dahl’s Hitler remarks, told me. “Plus, he came with this heroic baggage, the way he had dealt with tragedy in his life, and he was such a gifted writer. So, yeah, it was very jarring to hear it from him.”
As history shows, and Giant demonstrates, prejudice is often sustained not by the casual intolerance of the unwashed masses, but by the sophisticated justifications and permission structures devised by educated elites. Anti-Semitism is built on conspiracies and contradictions that take time for an observer to unravel. In fact, the very term anti-Semitism was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, a German nationalist who sought to distinguish his anti-Jewish ideology from the crass bigotry of the common folk by dressing his hate up in pseudoscientific terms.
Giant illustrates how prejudice can coexist with intelligence, talent, refinement, and even empathy. Shakespeare’s genius is as evident in The Merchant of Venice, which is pervaded by anti-Semitism, as in his other work. The technical and business acumen of Henry Ford, the music of Richard Wagner, and the heroic feats of physical endurance by the likes of Charles Lindbergh all thrived alongside their anti-Jewish activism.
Dahl was a polymath. He was a war hero and a literary virtuoso, responsible for both best sellers and Hollywood blockbusters. He even invented a valve to drain fluid from the brain of his injured infant son after contemporary remedies proved inadequate. “He was a pathological fixer of problems,” Rosenblatt, the playwright, told me. And “one of the most illusory tools for fixing problems, because it simplifies the world so much, is a conspiracy theory or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Dahl’s achievements would not have been possible without immense self-confidence. But such self-regard also made him obstinate, immune to correction, and prone to hubris—as well as prejudice. “Any person who is greater than another,” the Talmud declares, has a greater “evil inclination.” Or as a different giant of children’s literature, Albus Dumbledore, once put it: “Being—forgive me—rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”
Many struggle with this idea. They want to believe that those responsible for great deeds or good art are uncomplicatedly great and good themselves. And they want prejudiced people to be readily identifiable, defined by their shortcomings, and easily expunged from our collective canon and society. Put another way, they want bigots to be like the villains in Dahl’s books, not like Dahl himself. But Giant refuses to indulge this soothing fiction about human nature.
Whether the subject is Dahl, Israel, Palestine, or Lebanon, the play wants audiences to sit with reality in all its knottiness, contradiction, and brokenness. And it reminds them that the most frightening monster of all is not the sensational stuff of children’s stories, but the propensity to monstrosity that lives within all of us.
This is one of those spots where I'm not sure you can say anything and win. Because:
On one hand, selecting for disability and disorder absolutely is eugenics and should not be encouraged.
On the other hand, we already select for some disabilities and disorders in order to protect the kids who would have them! Tay-Sachs is the obvious example; we do not want these children to die horribly so we try to make sure they're not conceived in the first place.
On the other hand, a potential parent selecting for disability is concerning because not all disabilities show up in the womb, and some are acquired. Do we want to encourage people to become parents if they're already wanting to walk away from any difficulty?
On the other hand, there are disabilities and there are disabilities. What if a potential parent is like "listen, ADHD I can handle, but the disability you're talking about is so severe I don't think I could handle it"? Is that eugenics, or recognizing one's own limits?
On the other hand, if we could ask the fetus "here's what you'll deal with; do you want to live?" would it say yes or no? Some quadriplegics love living. Some amputees who lost part of a leg will say they wish they'd died instead. Every disabled person will have a different answer, including two who have near-identical disabilities and life circumstances. Hell, I'm disabled and whether I'm saying "it doesn't bother me" or "I wish I was anyone else" comes down to the day.
On the other hand, does it make a difference if the answer to "why do you want an abortion" is "I don't want a baby" or "I don't want a baby I perceive as defective"? Do we judge one but not the other? Why?
I could go on like this for hours. I don't think OP is right and I also don't think they're wrong. I'm not sure there is a "right" answer. I definitely don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer. Life is THE most annoying bitch on earth that way sometimes. And insofar as there is an answer, I actually think it lies with creating support, not restricting abortion. Would you still say "abort" if you had an extra $10k a year? What about someone to watch the kiddo on Saturdays so you could have some decompression time? Is there a load-bearing straw we can remove to spare the camel's back, or is the camel simply not capable of hauling this particular shipment of straw?
For what it's worth, a lot of abortions related to fetal abnormalities are lethal ones. A lot of people who would be willing to raise a disabled child are not willing to endure several more months of pregnancy for a child who is expected to die soon after birth. They just want it to be over, and I can't see any wrong way to respond to that sort of tragedy.
Abortions for manageable problems or disabilities do, in fact, horrify me, but is it any less horrifying than sex selection abortion? Or someone who really wants to be a parent but can't afford to care for a child? And in all cases, the answer is not to make abortions harder to access but to make parenting easier to do.
also... even if the pregnant person is like "I do not want a 'defective' baby no matter what support I get, ew disabled people" - yes it's a bigoted attitude to have and I would much rather they changed it, but ultimately it's an individual choice (as opposed to systemic / legal), and so it is disingenous to use that hypothetical to attack another marginalised group (pregnant and capable of geeting pregnant) when it doesn't do anything to actually support the marginalised group (disabled people) that it invokes
saying "oh but if we deny pregnant people healhcare make abortion easy to get people will abort disabled babies and that's eugenics!" do we maybe not think that there are more effective ways to help disabled people. just maybe.
anger doesn't have to be praxis, people. I would be horrified to meet with my hypothetical pregnant eugenicist but that doesn't make them an effective target
I saw this on reddit and tracked down the source (Dinara Fakhritdinova, _climbinggirl_ on instagram), because I know there's a lot of girls here on tumblr who need to see her back muscles
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Still kind of fucks me up that for the majority of human history we didn't know the Asteroid Belt existed.
It's only because astronomers noticed an unusual gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter that we found out there's anything there at all.
It looks so dense on maps and especially in the movies.
But most asteroids are relatively tiny and they're 1 million km apart from each other.
The collectibe mass of every asteroid in the asteroid is about 4% of the mass of the Moon, or 0.05% the mass of Earth. A third of that mass is just the dwarf planet Ceres.
my cat is completely obsessed with watching the bathroom sink drain and I have started calling this "her shows." as in when I'm in the bathroom and she meows and runs up I'll be like "oh you want to watch your shows?" and run the faucet for an extra few seconds so it fills a little. she will then sit there at the edge of the sink for ages totally entraptured by the drain. blorbo from her sink
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