Mark Rosenblatt: "I know Roald Dahl would hate someone like me."

BarcelonaGiant, by Mark Rosenblatt, has been the sensation of the season in English theater. It premiered last fall at the Royal Court Theatre and this spring was rescheduled at a commercial West End venue, the Harold Pinter Theatre, and has won three Olivier Awards. The play—something unusual—is playing in London and at the Teatro Romea in Barcelona, in the show's second production. All this is thanks to the keen eye of Josep Maria Pou, who saw it and came away enthusiastic. The actor plays the writer Roald Dahl at a critical moment: having become the great Anglo-Saxon author of young adult literature, when he is about to publish The witchesIn 1983, he was accused of anti-Semitism for an article containing statements such as: "Never before in the history of man has a race passed so rapidly from being a pitiable victim to a barbaric murderer." Giant arrives at the Grec Festival (until August 3) in the midst of the war in the Middle East.

Giant It's your first play, and it addresses a very heated debate today: Israel and antisemitism. Why did you choose this topic?

— In 2018, the UK Labour Party was formally investigated for antisemitism, and as the evidence began to emerge, I was struck by conversations where people in the party were speaking about Israel and Palestine in antisemitic language. I thought it would be interesting to dramatize this, and then I remembered that Roald Dahl, whose stories I loved growing up, was also accused of antisemitism. I found he had written an article that seemed like a perfect reflection of what was happening.

Does Roald Dahl connect with Jeremy Corbyn?

— I suppose so, with the Labour Party at the time. It seemed like an interesting human situation, too, to recount the private life of a famous writer 40 years later, with a certain distance and objectivity. But at first, I wasn't supposed to write the play.

And what happened?

— I pitched the idea to Nick Hytner, a very famous director and producer, who runs his own theatre [the London Theatre] and with whom I had worked when he ran the National Theatre, and he said, "Why don't you write it yourself?" I had already written film scripts, but I didn't expect to be a playwright.

What offended you about those private conversations within the Labour Party?

— That at the root, constitutively, at various levels within the party, there had been cases either of abuse of MPs by party members or of debates in which the line was crossed into challenging someone for their views and basically accusing people of almost medieval antisemitic stereotypes. For example, things like questioning the loyalty of a Jewish British MP because they defended some of Israel's actions. There's a stereotype that if you're Jewish, you're not totally loyal in England because you should also be loyal in Israel, which isn't necessarily true, because many Jews don't identify with Israel. The idea that a Jew is untrustworthy is a terrible prejudice. There were many things like that that I found very shocking.

A couple of years later, Corbyn was suspended, and it all seemed to be an internal maneuver by Blair's camp.

— Corbyn's Labour Party broadened its base and embraced more radical voices, some of which focused on Israel. I'm not saying it's all antisemitic; there are plenty of people who criticize Israel who aren't antisemitic. In a democracy, you should be able to challenge international politics and other countries, but I think you cross the line when you believe all Jews are alike, when you accuse them of being all pro-Israel, cowardly, disloyal, or when you say they manipulate the British democratic process or work for another country. All of these things are connected to something much deeper and more deceptive, which even predates the existence of the state of Israel. The idea of the dishonest Jew, and these terrible things, have been used for hundreds of years to create an enemy.

You are Jewish. This is important when writing the play.

— Yes, because the idea that I, in some ways, might not be seen as English because I'm Jewish was very shocking because I'm English. It's personal, but the work brings many different points of view that are valid.

Were you afraid the play would be canceled in light of the events of October 7, 2023, and everything that followed?

— The Royal Court agreed to produce the play on October 5, 2023. The fear was that the theater might think it was too controversial, but they kept it. The premiere was on September 26, 2024, exactly when Israel entered Lebanon [the play deals with the 1982 Lebanon War, when there were the Sabra and Shatila massacres]. At the preview, we were worried there would be protests, but the opposite happened. The play tries to present a balanced presentation with plenty of arguments from different sides, so whatever your point of view, it comes across. People don't feel attacked; you may feel uncomfortable, but you're included in the debate.

Roald Dahl was an appealing character to write because he was quirky. He is described as impulsive, cruel, and charming.

— He's fun to write because he's evil and mischievous; he's a narcissist and behaves terribly in the play. There's a certain way of being English where you can be rude but civil, funny, and horrible. Listening to interviews and reading his books, I tried to find the strange language he used to communicate. In the play, he deceives the other characters, and I thought there are a lot of devious tricks in his books; I realized I've written like a version of some of the characters in his books.

The work portrays a specific moment, but Dahl continued to make comments considered antisemitic. In fact, before his death, he declared himself an antisemite. There's no doubt about what he thought.

— The final scene of the play, the phone call, is composed of words he said in an interview. Nothing in the play is worse than what Roald Dahl said in real life. The most shocking and offensive phrases are his own. The play is an attempt to imagine how he came to say them.

In the real-time meeting we see, there is an American saleswoman, a fictional character, and her English editor, Tom Maschler, who was Jewish and whom Dahl liked.

— Yes, because that's how racism works. Often, it's not so clear. You confuse the general and the specific. You can say you hate Jews, but your friends might be Jewish. It doesn't make sense because racism doesn't make sense, but you have to function in the world you live in.

The work debates issues such as anti-Semitism, the limits of freedom of expression, and the danger of a boycott by booksellers.

— The main idea I wanted to explore is the difference between political debate and hate speech, and how to separate them. In Roald Dahl, you can see someone who is able to express great compassion for Palestine and, in the same breath, utter hate speech. You can criticize Israel without being racist, but racism is sometimes used to intensify criticism of Israel, and this is where Dahl stands.

We've reached the classic question of whether the work can be separated from the artist. It seems not, today, because the family apologized on behalf of their father, something he had never done.

— It's very difficult to generalize; it depends on the offenses. You can't make a blanket judgment. I read Roald Dahl's stories to my children. He's not canceled in my house, but I have a complicated relationship with him. I think we live in a world where cancel culture is very puritanical, very binary, very cruel; you're either for it or against it, forgetting that sometimes there are two truths. I like Dahl's work; I don't think his racism is there in his books, and if it was, I wouldn't read them to my children. At the same time, I know he would hate someone like me in some way, and that's not very nice. But I love his books, and I want to share them with my children. It's not easy.

I've noticed that you don't read all the adjectives.

— Yes, there are books written decades ago that sometimes have ways of describing characters or make some judgments that I simply don't want to introduce into the heads of my children, who are still young.

The lucrative value of his name is clear to everyone. In 2020, his family apologized, and in 2021, Netflix bought all the rights to his books.

— It's easy to think one thing has to do with the other, but I don't know the family, I don't know. I know there's some Jewish heritage in the family now, and perhaps it came from here; they thought it was time to confront it. Again, the reasons are complex, and perhaps it shouldn't be one thing or the other.