John Lithgow wins Tony Award for portraying Roald Dahl in ‘Giant,’ about author's antisemitism
When John Lithgow won the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play earlier this week for his portrayal of Roald Dahl in Giant, Mark Rosenblatt’s drama about the author’s dark side, he took the opportunity to speak movingly about antisemitism.
“Antisemitism, cruelty of all kinds, hatred of the other – these are things that we’re dealing with these days, up front and personal,” Lithgow told reporters after his win, according to The Algemeiner. “That’s what makes Giant so important and such a success.”
In his acceptance speech at Radio City Music Hall in New York, Lithgow called Giant an “extraordinary play” that was created by “people full of love and kindness.”
“But it’s a play about cruelty in a cruel age. And it’s an extraordinarily important play of this moment,” the award-winning actor said.
The play, which Nicholas Hytner directed, is set in 1983, just as the author of many beloved children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, was preparing to publish The Witches.
At the same time, Dahl was facing pressure from his publishers to apologize for comments he made in a review of God Cried, a picture book about the first Lebanon War.
In the review, Dahl wrote, “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”
He also said that the media would not print the truth about what the IDF had done in that war: “It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned.”
In an interview in the New Statesman that year, Dahl was even more antisemitic, even blaming Jews for the Holocaust.
“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason,” he had said.
Not long before his death, Dahl said, “I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become antisemitic.”
Giant is ‘especially relevant’ in times of increased antisemitism
Giant is about how several of Dahl’s friends and acquaintances, including Jewish literary figures, tried to convince him to retract these inflammatory comments.
The play was widely praised for portraying the tension between Dahl’s genius and charm, on the one hand, and his hatred and cruelty on the other.
The controversy that Giant depicts is especially relevant at a time of increased worldwide antisemitism and intense arguments over the difference between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews.
Frank Scheck, writing in New York Stage Review, called the play “disturbingly topical,” describing Lithgow’s Dahl as initially “playful, charming, and kindly,” but said that “he’s also, as we soon learn, deeply and revoltingly antisemitic.”
In The Atlantic, Yair Rosenberg wrote that Giant does not reduce Dahl to a caricature but instead shows that the author “excels at many things, including antisemitism.”
Rosenberg wrote that Lithgow’s Dahl is “incisive, avuncular, irascible, acerbic, and always entertaining,” while also displaying “casual misogyny, narcissism, and antisemitism.”
Lithgow was widely praised for illuminating that complexity. In an interview before the Tony Awards, Lithgow said he was drawn to Dahl’s contradictions, including what he called the writer’s “witting and unwitting cruelty.”
Lithgow’s Tony win comes after Giant won major awards in London, including the Olivier Award for Best New Play and Best Actor for Lithgow.
At 80, he is the oldest male actor to win a competitive Tony Award for acting. He previously won two Tony Awards, for The Changing Room in 1973 and Sweet Smell of Success in 2002.
In his acceptance speech, Lithgow reflected on those “two Tony bookends,” saying he had enjoyed many “ecstatic moments” onstage over the decades, but that this one was among the best.
Lithgow also earned two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment.
Dahl is not the first complex real-life figure he has portrayed. Lithgow played Winston Churchill on the TV series The Crown; Roger Ailes in Bombshell; and Alfred Kinsey in Kinsey.
The Broadway production of Giant is scheduled to run through June 28.
