THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Mark Rosenblatt
Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS, until November 16, 2024
Things have come full circle for the great American actor John Lithgow. In the late ‘60s and fresh out of LAMDA (The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and yes, he did a stint at this key London drama school) he wangled a job as assistant to the director of a play at the then newly opened Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court. 55 years later, he’s back, on the main stage, a Star.
This is no empty star vehicle, though, but a stirring and vital piece of theater which marks the debut of writer Mark Rosenblatt. It’s the story of the world famous children’s author Roald Dahl (Lithgow). It’s the summer of 1983, he’s making final edits to The Witches, he’s freshly divorced, engaged to his mistress (Rachael Stirling) and is being driven demented by builders renovating his expansive country residence.
A media backlash has blown up after he, in a deliberate act of provocation, has published an explicitly antisemitic book review inThe Literary Review in which he wades into the Arab-Israeli conflict using the language of the blood libel. This was at a crucial phase in the war in Lebanon when tensions were running particularly high and, déjà vu, sadly the same issue leads the news today. Rosenblatt has crafted a darkly humorous play which blends real circumstances with an imaginary encounter to illuminate the difficult issue of the difference between considered opinion and dangerous rhetoric.
The action takes place around a single afternoon at Dahl’s home where his UK publisher – the PR wizard of the time, Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey) – and a rep from his US publisher, Farrar Strauss & Giroux, circle him and strategize, like lion keepers in a zoo. They are there to talk him down off his high horse and issue a quick apology as the scandal is already hitting sales in the US. The NY rep is an invented composite character named Jessie Stone (Romola Garai) and Rosenblatt uses the character to provide a counter to Dahl’s vituperation.
Acclaimed director Nicholas Hytner and designer Bob Crowley have fashioned a compelling piece of naturalistic theater here which is by turns absorbing, witty and gut wrenchingly tense. Lithgow (who bears a stunning resemblance to Dahl) commands the stage, perfectly capturing the scalpel-like barbed wit and supercilious manner of the author, who is a mix of old school charm and boot boy. His great achievement here is not to make him a monster but rather a complex, multi-layered, mess of contradictions.
Garai shines as his nemesis, who bats away the stinging insults and holds her ground. Her impassioned speech at the end of Act One is a triumph. Things soften over lunch as Stone and Dahl bond over both having disabled children, but sentimentality is never allowed to hold sway and Hytner’s pacing here is wonderfully brisk. Tessa Bonham Jones and Richard Hope provide some grounding to the lofty ideas at play as the family cook and an old retainer.
Sterling is solid as the devoted ‘wife’, constantly walking on egg shells and choosing any course that will pacify the Great Man. The suave Maschler, long used to Dahl’s personal insults (“you boot licker”) and casual antisemitism, feels his talent is such that the sins can be forgiven, but at what cost, the play asks? Levey is glorious at embodying the almost physical toll of living with these contradictions.
