Elliot Levey, a New ‘Giant’ on Broadway, Confronts Antisemitism

One of the toughest tickets to secure on Broadway these days is to a Tony-nominated play that spends some two hours exploring the baleful borderlands where anti-Zionism and antisemitism converge. “Giant,” written by Mark Rosenblatt, centers on the animus the author Roald Dahl held for the Jews and their state. The play arrived on these shores after a triumphant run at London. One of the play’s stars, Elliot Levey, tells the Sun over the course of an hour-long interview that the play’s study of British antisemitism, while set some 40 years in the past, throbs with timeliness. The four-time Tony nominated production — including for Best Drama — has recouped its $5.6 million capitalization just 10 weeks into its planned 16-week run. A filmed version of its London production will hit movie theaters this fall. With John Lithgow as Dahl, “Giant” turns on a fictional meeting one summer afternoon in 1983 at Dahl’s Gipsy House at Great Buckinghamshire. In attendance are the author and his agent (Mr. Levey’s Tom Maschler), and a sales executive, Jess Stone (Aya Cash) from his publisher, Farrar Straus & Giroux. Ms. Stone, unlike the other characters, is Mr.Rosenblatt’s creation. The summit is imagined, while the underlying facts are not. The assembly is convened to stem the fallout from a review, shot through with animus, that Dahl wrote in 1983 for Literary Review against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. They worry that the scandal will sink Dahl’s upcoming “The Witches.” How quaint that anti-Israel animus could do that, a viewer might reckon in 2026. So Stone, Dahl, Maschler, and descend on the great man’s country estate to contain the damage and wrangle an apology Dahl has no desire to deliver. In that book review from 1983 Dahl wrote that of the Jews that “never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” He likened Israel’s military action against the Palestine Liberation Organization to a “group of much-loved nuns in charge of an orphanage” having “suddenly turned around and started murdering all the children.” To this critic’s eyes the play’s most intriguing character is not so much Dahl himself as Mr. Levey’s Maschler. Mr. Levey, like Mr. Lithgow and the play itself, won an Oliver award for his work. Maschler, who led Jonathan Cape for some three decades, was born in Berlin and was five years old when his family fled Vienna in the wake of the Anschluss. He is credited with creating the Booker Prize as an Anglo counterweight to the Prix Goncourt.Aya Cash, John Lithgow, Elliot Levey, and Rachael Stirling in ‘Giant,’ 2026. Joan Marcus for ‘Giant’Here Maschler is Dahl’s agent, well-schooled in the genius’s prejudices. Dahl asks him where he lives and suggests Stamford Hill, Golders Green, and other Jewish neighborhoods of London as possibilities. Maschler, more British than the British, responds simply “Kensington,” the tony district that is to the above areas what the Upper East Side would be to the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Maschler steps out to play tennis with Ian McEwan.The Sun caught up with Mr. Levey on Zoom hours before a weekday performance of “Giant,” which is scheduled to run through June, a tenure that many expect to be extended on a wave of robust attendance and critical acclaim. Mr. Levey, who read philosophy at Oxford and has two Olivier awards under his belt — one for this role, another for Herr Schultz in “Cabaret” — calls London home. His dispatch from the city, though, is dire.Mr. Levey tells the Sun that “October 7 changed everything for British Jews” and that “What happened on October 8” — the outpouring of support for Hamas and enthusiasm for the massacre in the Negev long before any response from the Jewish state — “will mystify me to the end of time. That’s what wakes me up at 4 AM.” He testifies to the “insane” lack of empathy for, say, young partygoers massacred and raped at the Nova music festival.Mr. Levey laments how his own actor’s guild endorsed an anti-Israel march on October 7 itself, while “there were still Jewish kids hiding under dead bodies” — a “repellent and repulsive” juxtaposition. The author Howard Jacobson, in his new post-October 7 novel “Howl,” asks “Why, if Jews had been slaughtered, were my neighbors across the road calling for the slaughter of more?” Mr. Levey explains that Kensington, where Maschler resided, was “where a certain type of Jew in the 1980s would live “to signify that they are more English than the English.” The actor mentions the peculiarity of the “ironic way of thinking about the Jew” that is a habit of the English aristocracy — arch but unmistakable. Mr. Levey says that as a British Jew he has spent his life uneasily “laughing at banter.” Less subtle are the crowds that Mr. Levey encountered on the Tube on his way to perform at London. They were “calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.” He contrasts that with the “robustness and bullishness” he sees in America, even as antisemitic storm clouds darken the horizon of the goldene medina.Mr. Levey tells the Sun that the conversations he has with theatergoers here at New York on his walk home after the curtain falls amount to an extension of the play’s action — “Act III takes place between 45th and 53rd streets.” He marvels at a city still “curious and alive.” In contrast, he reckons, “at home in England the jury is back in and have made their decision when it comes to Israel” — guilty — “it is no longer up for debate. The final nails have been hit into the coffin.”That hostility toward Israel has emerged as a threat to Britain’s Jews. Just days after the Sun spoke to Mr. Levey, a man attacked two Jewish men in the London neighborhood of Golders Green. In March, an arson attack set aflame two Hatzola ambulances in the same neighborhood. Both attacks have been linked to a shadowy terror group that answers to Tehran. On Yom Kippur a terrorist killed two Jews at a Manchester synagogue.So acute has the peril to British Jews grown that King Charles III visited Golders Green last week to impart a sense of solidarity. When, in the play, Stone asks Maschler, “If they came for you again, where would you go?” Mr. Levey’s character waits a beat and replies “Provence.” English Jews now, though, appear to be weighing a different conclusion — a record number of them attended an aliyah fair last week. At one point in the play Mr. Levey’s Maschler reasons in respect of antisemitism that “Mostly it’s boys finding good sticks to whack each other with.” Dahl, picking up that thread, later responds “If I’m an antisemite, then what are you, Tom? A house Jew, I suppose.” The play ends with a phone call to a journalist from Dahl where the author, tipsy on Chablis, giggles that Hitler might have been right on the main even if he went overboard.Mr. Levey charts what he calls a “stunning and imperceptible” coolness toward him at parties around London in the wake of Hamas’s attacks, which he allows could be tinctured with paranoia but which he reckons is also tied to the turn against the Jewish state and the explosion of “schoolboy” denunciations of Israel that have become de rigeur. He cites the Bloomsbury Circle for the proposition that to “be antisemitic is a ticket into high society.”Still, Mr. Levey, whose father-in-law is veteran film director and left-wing political firebrand Ken Loach, lauds this play — a sentiment shared by this interviewer — and declares that “I was read Dahl by my father, who was an Orthodox Jew. I read Dahl to my three Jewish boys.” Mr. Levey then offers something of a scoop. He shares that the playwright Tom Stoppard saw “Giant” a few weeks before he died, “one of the last things” he did. Afterwards, he was ushered into Mr. Levey’s dressing room, where he shared “cheap rosé ” with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Mr. Levey marveled that the scene in those cramped quarters was “astonishing.” Mr. Stoppard’s wife, the Anglo-Irish heiress Sabrina Guinness, was once known as the “It Girl” of her generation and had liaisons with King Charles, then Prince of Wales, the actor Jack Nicholson, and Mr. Jagger. Her sister married a Rothschild. Mr. Levey, leaning toward the screen conspiratorially, shares that it was at Ms. Guinness’s mother’s house that Dahl met his second wife — Felicity “Liccy” Crosland — and was “beguiled” into writing the review that generated “Giant.”

Elliot Levey, a New ‘Giant’ on Broadway, Confronts Antisemitism

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