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ANOTHER play exploring the anti-Semitism of Roald Dahl, shines the spotlight once again on growing concern that he has been honoured by the Welsh capital.
Publicity for Giant at the Royal Court in London declares about it: “Inspired by real events, Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play explores with dark humour the difference between considered opinion and dangerous rhetoric”.
This follows a further production earlier this year at the same theatre, which also looked at the problematic past of Mr Dahl, and was described as a “highlight”.
Giant is set over a single summer lunchtime at Mr Dahl’s Buckinghamshire country home in 1983, and he has recently published a review in a literary journal of God Cried, a book about the 1982 Lebanon War in which Israel invaded its northern neighbour (which surely has echoes today!).
In it he refers to Jews as “a race of people” who had “switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers”, and he describes the US as being “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that “they dare not defy” Israel.
Mr Dahl said in an interview with the New Statesman (NS): “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews…Hitler didn’t pick on Jews for no reason”.
Apparently endorsing this repugnant observation, more than thirty years ago Mr Dahl said to The Independent: “I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism”.
These obnoxious views would doubtless have become even more trenchant in the wake of Israel’s offensive in Lebanon.
Mr Dahl wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and one of the characters in it (the ‘Child Catcher’) was almost certainly an anti-Semitic stereotype.
The Jerusalem Post said about him: “Dahl harbored deep animus towards Israel in tandem with rabid Jew-hatred. And he was never less than forthcoming in broadcasting his racism.”.
Mr Rosenblatt believes a play about Mr Dahl’s terrible bigotry, is an effective vehicle to explore the problem of anti-Semitism generally, although Mr Dahl’s appalling views have always been well-known, making his honouring by Cardiff all the more remarkable.
Worries are mounting about celebrating the city as the birthplace of Mr Dahl, with plaques on numerous buildings.
Officials have faced awkward questions about Mr Dahl, after a filled in ‘holding dock’ became a pleasant walkway in the heart of Cardiff Bay, and was called Roald Dahl Plass (RDP).
One tourist walking with his family in RDP told The Eye: “This is a lovely place for me and the kids, but naming it Roald Dahl Plass after what he’s said, seems a bit much!”.
Another proclaimed: “I really like it down here, but I don’t like walking in a place named after this man”.
Commemorating Mr Dahl seems bizarre to critics, despite his superb story-telling, and the issue calls into question the dilemma of whether it is actually POSSIBLE to separate (and venerate) masterly work from the shocking background of the person behind it.
Perhaps this could be the plot of a THIRD play at the Royal Court!
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when the truth about revered individuals was always reported) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – how during that career (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), Phil has always been lucky enough to work in a relatively free environment for the media, and this is now underlined by more evidence emerging today of the opposite being the case in one of the biggest countries on earth – China.
