The week in theatre: Giant; Roots; Look Back in Anger – review

Here in one evening is the case for the stage. An incendiary subject, an extraordinary debut play, a fleet production, top-notch acting. Everything on the wing. At the centre of Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant towers John Lithgow, magnificent as Roald Dahl: impassioned and soured, mischievous and bullying.

Tall and stooped, his long face a magic lantern over which flits moues and pursings and winces, he pronounces the name of his American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) with the “Girooooux” contemptuously extended, as if it were a French affectation. In the course of the play he becomes terrifying, yet the monstrousness is inflected by the keen affection of his no-flies future wife: Rachael Stirling brings poised intelligence – askance but not arch – to a finely written part.

Related: ‘I’m an ordinary man who plays crazy parts’: John Lithgow on tackling Roald Dahl

The occasion of the play is real: a 1983 book review by Dahl in which condemnation of the actions of Israeli forces during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon slithered into racial condemnation. The circumstances are imagined: a meeting with his real-life British publisher Tom Maschler and a fictional representative of FSG, Jessie Stone, in which the two publishers, both Jewish, try to persuade Dahl to deny any antisemitism and avoid bad publicity as his new book The Witches appears. The argument is intense, precise: with Dahl describing the massacre in Beirut; Romola Garai as Stone, shimmering between nervy and bold, pleading the distinction between the government and the people of Israel. The closing moments are rattlesnake-shocking. Dahl, having seemed to be about to comply, breezily phones in a slew of antisemitic poison to the New Statesman: the words here are Dahl’s own: “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on them for no reason”.

Nicholas Hytner’s production has exceptional clarity and conviction, helped by Bob Crowley’s fine design of cluttered (building work is enraging the author) comfort. Giant is not fancy in form but its movement is intricate. One detailed argument gives rise to another, and the play is better for not resolving them all. Should an author’s opinions affect our reading? Could The Witches with its “child-snatching, money-printing devils” be read as coded antisemitism? Is it racism that allows Israelis to see “another’s home” as their own “sanctuary”? Does the urge to provoke that winks behind some of Dahl’s confrontations – and that made his books so lively – undermine his accusations? It is a great strength of Lithgow’s extraordinary performance that he suggests that Dahl’s abhorrence of killings in Lebanon was as real as his antisemitism – and not prompted by it.

I have another interest in Giant. Four years before the play’s action, I was working with Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Elliot Levey’s excellent characterisation – as always meticulously subtle – is in no sense an imitation. Magnetically energetic, dashing, boastful and gifted, Maschler could scent a book’s success, financial or aesthetic – Philip Roth or Jeffrey Archer – by glancing at a manuscript. Lithgow’s Dahl makes a crack about him not actually reading: that’s unfair but it touches a nerve. As does Rosenblatt’s examination of a sensitive area – the friendship between publisher and author. Maschler’s inner life worked through books rather than people. Ask him how he was and he would tell you how many titles he had in the bestseller list. In his autobiography (a book that would not have scraped on to the Cape list), he quotes a long letter from Dahl as evidence of affection, not observing that the screed is all about Dahl. Rosenblatt draws on the blind naivety – unexpected from a hawklike operator – to provide a skewering moment of betrayal. Like everything in this telling script, it rings chillingly true.

Friendship did occasionally triumph over Maschler’s commercial savvy. He went on publishing Arnold Wesker long after the writer had ceased to be fashionable as one of the 50s dramatists who had disrupted the gentility of the stage. Diyan Zora’s production of Roots makes the loyalty look justified.

The tale of Beatie Bryant, the young woman from a family of East Anglian farmworkers, who glimpses enlarged horizons through a London boyfriend but is stunned into silence, is an extraordinary piece of work: intimate and visionary. Naturalistically of its time – zinc bath with scented cubes – it unfolds quietly with patterned repetitive comic dialogue about buses and indigestion. Yet Wesker is masterly at working the stage (his Kitchen is a lesson in how to tell a story through choreography) and keeps administering surprises. Some of them are thrills. A woman has the most adventurous voice. The action is set in the countryside, a place more or less untroubled by the theatre outside Chekhov and Shakespeare. Humdrum dialogue is interrupted – as it has been since by Caryl Churchill – by visionary episodes. Sophie Stanton is terrific as the supposedly limited but shrewd kitchen-bound mother. Morfydd Clark, most persuasive when tremulous, delivers the final famous speech, in which, man-free, she finds her own voice, as if truly surprised by her own transforming eloquence. As I was surprised, though braced for the unleashing, by being moved.

Which I was not during Atri Banerjee’s revival of the more celebrated Look Back in Anger (1956). The staging is to some extent attuned to John Osborne’s description of his play: that Jimmy Porter’s ragings are not “tirades” but “arias”. Though still using the crucial ironing board and other realistic details (a friend who saw the 1956 premiere said it was a jolt simply to see people on stage reading the Sunday newspapers, one of them the Observer), Naomi Dawson’s design is stripped back, with a central pit inviting the warring couple into hell, and lighting by Lee Curran of such intensity as to suggest a terminal struggle of spirits. Billy Howle dazzles as Porter: as raw and ranging as Poor Tom on King Lear’s heath. But for all their force, his speeches are puny: Osborne glorying in his misogynistic power. It is adventurous of the Almeida – a theatre to which everyone should take out a subscription – to offer this historical snapshot in its Angry and Young season. But it is time to look forward, not back.

Star ratings (out of five)
Giant ★★★★★
Roots ★★★★
Look Back in Anger ★★★

• Giant is at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, London, until 16 November

• Roots is at the Almeida, London, until 23 November

• Look Back in Anger is at the Almeida, London, until 23 November