The seed for Giant was planted almost 35 years ago when a 14-year old Mark Rosenblatt and his friend were tasked with presenting the week’s news to a school assembly.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had just died and Rosenblatt assumed that they should mark the passing of a hero. His friend, a Muslim, equally assumed that everyone would understand that Begin was a terrorist. Fast forward from London’s St. Paul’s School in March 1992 to May 2026 in New York, and Rosenblatt is nominated for a Tony for best new play for his run of Giant on Broadway. The play, which he wrote about an episode in the life of children’s book author Roald Dahl when he criticized Israel and espoused a pernicious antisemitism, deals with differences in perspectives on the Jewish state, and the limits of reasonable opinions.

When I spoke to him on Zoom from London, Rosenblatt and I negotiated our own small differences before we discussed the larger geopolitical issues that the play raises. Soup (Rosenblatt) or tea? Leeds (me) or London? Masorti or Conservative (is there a difference)? But the very ease of triangulating our positions within U.K. Jewry and finding out the first tranche of mutual friends, is just proof of the minuscule size of the community. At barely more than quarter of a million, the Jews of Britain are a minority comprising only about 0.5% of the population and while we don’t all know each other, there’s only ever small pools of people the same rough age and prepared to publicly avow their Jewishness.

That’s why when Dahl (John Lithgow, nominated for a Tony for lead actor) complains that he never saw any Jews fighting for Britain with him in the war, it’s a smack-my-head moment for British Jews. Rosenblatt is giving voice to Dahl’s own quote to reporter Michael Coren, where he rehearses a well-trodden slander. British Jews disproportionately served in the war — actually doubly disproportionately in the RAF where Dahl did his military service — but because there are fewer Jews in the world than residents of Tokyo City (and fewer in England than the population of Bournemouth), it’s still statistically highly unlikely that Dahl would have served with one. And, if he did, Rosenblatt pointed out to me, why would that person have revealed his ethnicity to Dahl or others in a society so riddled with antisemitism?

Rosenblatt grew up, like many British Jews of our generation — he’s 48 years old, I’m 55 — with Israel as a potential holiday destination and a promise of ultimate safety: an odd amalgam of Mediterranean resort and escape from the return of the Nazis. The promise of safe refuge in a hostile world was especially meaningful for him growing up as a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor — many family members of his maternal grandmother were murdered by the Nazis.

“That narrative of sanctuary was strong,” he told me. Thinking about Israel as an alternative homeland from the home of his birth sounded unthinkable at the time, but stabbings in Manchester and London, fire-bombed synagogues, and destroyed Jewish ambulances have shaken British Jews since Giant began its run at the Music Box Theatre in March. And, of course, Israel was a topic upon which otherwise similar folks’ worldviews could diverge.

“It didn’t transform me overnight,” Rosenblatt said of his school assembly moment. “But I became aware very quickly that other people thought very, very differently.”

From small beginnings, giant things

The play, Rosenblatt’s first as playwright, didn’t begin with Israel, nor did it begin with Dahl. It began, Rosenblatt said, with the British Labour Party’s antisemitism crisis in the late 2010s — specifically, with the way that conversations about Israel within the party would turn into older, darker and more conspiratorial accusations about Jews.

“I found the medieval nature of some of those stereotypes shocking,” he said of the racist comments that were commonplace and tolerated under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. “The grouping together of millions of people as if we all have innate characteristics.”

But Rosenblatt wasn’t interested in writing a documentary play about the Labour Party. He was  a director — indeed, in 1999 he had won the JMK Award for Young Directors, a prestigious early career award whose patrons include Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to write at all, initially asking one of Britain’s preeminent directors Sir Nicholas Hytner for advice about who he might approach to write the play he was looking for. Rosenblatt wanted a proxy — something that could dramatize the distinction between legitimate political criticism and antisemitic tropes.

That’s when he came across clippings about Dahl, the beloved childhood author who had, in a generally forgotten episode, made and then doubled down on inflammatory remarks about Jews in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, in the form of a book review and later comments to the press. Perhaps the most egregious quotation, after he suggested Jews as a “race” were responsible for loss of life in Beirut, was the remark that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [Jews] for no reason.”

The material clicked immediately. Here was a “perfect premise”: a globally-adored writer, in his own home, under pressure to account for what he’d said. The domestic setting allowed Rosenblatt to layer the political with the personal — Dahl’s family life, his grief, his acerbic personality, his ego — until the play, though deeply specific, became less about a single scandal than about the conditions that produce hate speech from people who should know better.

Rosenblatt wrote the play he was looking for. Hytner directed, earning an Olivier nomination and now a nod for a Tony.

Enter the American

One of Rosenblatt’s most consequential decisions about the play was also, in a sense, a mistake. In early drafts, he imagined Dahl’s American publisher, the legendary Robert Gottlieb visiting him alongside his British editor Tom Maschler. It turned out that this would have been anachronistic, since Gottlieb had left Farrar, Straus and Giroux years earlier. But the American presence remained an important intervention. The result is Jessie Stone, an invented Jewish American FSG sales director who arrives in Dahl’s English country house as both emissary and antagonist. She triangulates the discussion, disrupting, by her Americanness, Jewishness, lack of seniority and femininity (she is importantly, too, a mother) what might otherwise have been a locking of antlers between three eminent men. But she is also something more interesting: Rosenblatt’s attempt to imagine the confidence of American Jewishness.

“If you come from the U.K.,” he said, “you’re part of a tiny minority in a culture that doesn’t really know what you are.” Britain has, at most, a few hundred thousand Jews. New York has millions. The difference is not just demographic; it’s psychological.

“In America,” he said, “Jewish life is part of the mainstream fabric. You can speak with confidence about your identity and expect to be understood…. In England, you are thankful if anyone knows anything”

Jessie Stone, played In London and on Broadway by Aya Cash, a Tony nominee for featured actress, embodies that confidence. Where Maschler (Elliot Levey) “dances” — deflecting, accommodating, surviving — Stone confronts. Where he reads the room, she pulps it. The antagonism between Dahl and Stone is explicit and central, but the tension between Stone and Maschler goes beyond the personal and becomes cultural. British Jewish caution meets American Jewish assertion, and they despair of one other.

History rhymes

If Giant has not changed since its West End premiere, its audience certainly has. The play was greenlit on October 5, 2023. Two days later, Hamas attacked Israel. By the time the production opened at the Royal Court a year later, Israel had returned to Lebanon — echoing the very history the play dramatizes. (The past March, which saw an IDF ground invasion of Southern Lebanon, has only made its Broadway tenure more timely.)

“We were concerned the theatre might pull it,” Rosenblatt said of the Royal Court. “They didn’t. They said, ‘We want this play.’”

(The Court was just under new leadership, following a troubled recent history of dubious characterization of Jews.)

What followed was a kind of unintended experiment. Audiences arrived “incredibly genned up,” as Rosenblatt put it — immersed in a contemporary conflict that made the play’s historical argument feel immediate, even urgent. Lines from Dahl that might once have seemed shocking began to sound, in some cases, familiar.

“The more hostility there is towards Israel,” he said, “the more some of those tropes get repeated as if they’re acceptable truths.”

On Broadway, the play has undergone another subtle transformation. In London, the audience encountered Stone as an outsider — an American “alien landing” in a room full of English eccentricity. In New York, the sense of what is familiar totally flips.

“We’re on weird planet England,” Rosenblatt said of the opening scenes, “waiting for the arrival of one of our own.”

That shift of perspective matters because it changes where the audience’s sympathies lie, and what they notice. British viewers, raised with the nuances of class, recognize the delicate choreography of Maschler’s interactions with Dahl — the way he absorbs insult to maintain access and influence. They understand how he treats the insecure public schoolboy that lies behind the arrogant, bigoted celebrity. For Maschler it’s more important to lead this overgrown child to his better self than to mouth some form of banal pseudo-integrity. Better for Dahl to make and sell books successfully while explaining publicly that criticism should be separate from racism, than for Maschler to protect his own ego. American audiences, less attuned to those codes, sometimes read the same behavior as weakness.

Rosenblatt doesn’t dispute the reading; he contextualizes it. “I see it as survival,” he said. Maschler is not failing to stand up for himself; he is choosing when and how to do so. It’s a distinction that may be more legible in a culture where minority status has historically required a certain kind of strategic accommodation.

For all its topical resonance, Giant is not a play about the news cycle. It is, instead, a play about what happens when private prejudice collides with public responsibility — and about how communities argue, internally, about where that line lies.

Rosenblatt resists the idea that he is delivering a message to any particular audience, including the American Jewish readers of the Forward. The play, he suggests, does its work not by instructing but by staging contradiction.

“There are no neat messages,” he said. “Other than that antisemitism is a terrible thing. Beyond that, it’s about complexity and nuance — and inviting people to think.”

That invitation feels at once both modest and radical. In an era of algorithmic certainty and ideological sorting, Giant insists on something messier: that people can be wrong in ways that are revealing, that arguments can be both necessary and insufficient, and that identity — British or American, Jewish or otherwise — is less a fixed position than a set of pressures, constantly negotiated.

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