Dark side of Roald Dahl: Author’s anti-semitic views laid bare in blistering new play that serves as a reminder that the beloved author could be a cheat and a monster too

He inspired us to believe that somewhere inside we all have the power to change the world, and showed us that a little magic can take you a long way. 

But while Roald Dahl’s reputation as one of the great children’s storytellers remains undeniable, his literary legacy forever secured by classics like Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, the darker aspects of the author’s worldview have become barely less notorious since his death in 1990.

In his novel The Twits, Dahl reflected on how external appearances can be deceptive. ‘You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth,’ he wrote, ‘but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams.’ 

The flip side of that sentiment, however, is that unwholesome thoughts can also be concealed beneath an outwardly respectable veneer. 

Dahl might have captured the imagination of millions of children with characters like Charlie Bucket, the 10-year-old boy who rises from poverty to become heir to Willy Wonka’s confectionery empire in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but his toxic personal views stood in stark contrast to the family-friendly tales he produced.

That is why the the Olivier award-winning play Giant, which deals with Dahl’s noxious antisemitism and has just transferred to the West End, will make for uncomfortable viewing for those who view the author only through the lens of his classic tales. 

Infamously, Dahl’s beliefs were laid bare in his musings on another author’s work. In August 1983, he wrote a review of God Cried, an account of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the previous year produced by the Australian author Tony Clifton.

‘Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,’ Dahl wrote in the Literary Review. 

‘Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.’

When the New Statesman subsequently contacted Dahl to ask about the review, in which the author also stated that the US was ‘dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions’ to the point where they ‘dare not defy’ Israel, Dahl doubled down on his views.

Born in 1916, Dahl was just three years old when his father died. At the age of nine, he was sent to boarding school and hated every moment. He left at 17 and went adventuring in Africa

In 1983, children’s author Roald Dahl wrote a review of a book called God Cried, an account of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the previous year, that was considered to be deeply antisemitic

‘There’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere,’ the writer told journalist Michael Coren. ‘Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.’

Coren, who had anticipated that he would find Dahl in more contrite mood, was stunned by the author’s intransigence.

‘The assumption was that he would row back from his extremist stance and the story might make a few paragraphs in the next edition,’ Coren wrote in this space last year. 

‘When I phoned him that day, I had no idea that our exchange would still be being talked about decades later.

‘If I had expected him to apologise for some of what he’d written, or at least qualify the harshness and inaccurate generalisations, I was soon to be disappointed. The opposite happened.

‘When I raised the tenor of [his] observations with the author, he was polite – not unfriendly – and spoke slowly and deliberately. But it was as if I’d opened the doors on some dark, deep hatred that had been waiting for years to be expressed.’

The fallout from this reputation-puncturing episode provides the starting point for Giant, which premiered at the Royal Court theatre in London last September and has now transferred to the West End.

Starring John Lithgow as Dahl, who stood 6ft 6in tall but saw his stature greatly diminished in the eyes of many as a result of the scandal, Mark Rosenblatt’s play earned the American a best actor award at the Oliviers.

John Lithgow in Giant at the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square, London. The play, by Mark Rosenblatt, has just transferred to the Harold Pinter theatre for a West End run

In the play, Romola Garai, left, plays an American Jewish sales executive sent to persuade Lithgow’s Dahl, second from left, to issue a public apology for antisemitic remarks

Michael Coren subsequently interviewed Dahl for the New Statesman and was told by the author: ‘Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [Jews] for no reason’

Dahl is seen with his first wife, the Hollywood actress Patricia Neal, at the 1969 Academy Awards ceremony. The couple had five children together 

The drama opens with Jessie Stone, an American Jewish sales executive dispatched by Dahl’s publisher, attempting to persuade Dahl that a public apology would be in order. 

The to-and-fro that develops between the pair gradually throws light on the author’s views until, eventually, they are illuminated with glaring intensity.

In that sense, even the fictional elements of the drama find a counterpart in real events. Just as the darker side of Dahl’s nature becomes ever plainer on stage, so it was in real life. 

In 1990, just months before his death at the age of 74, Dahl spelled out his bigoted beliefs in definitive fashion.

‘I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism,’ he told the Independent. ‘I think they should see both sides.

‘It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do –  that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.’

In the aftermath of his death, the troubling nature of Dahl’s personal views was initially overshadowed by his reputation as one of the foremost children’s writers of the 20th century. 

In 2003, four of his books made the top 100 of The Big Read, a BBC survey to determine the ‘nation’s best-loved novel’.

But the tide began to turn in 2018, when it emerged that a plan to honour his life and works with a commemorative coin had been rejected by the Royal Mint because Dahl was ‘associated with antisemitism and not regarded as an author of the highest reputation’.

Together with the Roald Dahl Story Company, the novelist’s family later issued an apology for ‘the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements’.  

The darker side of Dahl’s imagination, often reflected in his children’s books, was front and centre in his short story collection Tales of the Unexpected, which became a TV series 

Dahl with Patricia Neal. Their marriage was was scarred not only by his infidelities but also by mishap and tragedy, including the death of their seven-year-old daughter from measles

Dahl answers a telephone while filming an episode of the science fiction show Way Out in Central Park, New York, in 1961

‘Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations,’ read a statement on the author’s official website.

Yet it remains far from clear that Dahl had a positive impact on those closest to him. 

His first wife, the Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, who had previously been married to Hollywood legend Clark Gable, dubbed him ‘Roald the Rotten’, portraying him as an arrogant and irritable figure.

It cannot have helped that Dahl was a serial womaniser, even cheating on Neal with her closest friends – one of whom, Felicity D’Abreu, became his second wife in 1983 after an 11-year affair.

Dahl’s marriage to Neal was scarred not only by his infidelities but also by tragedy and accident. 

Their baby son was badly injured when a taxi hit his pram, their eldest daughter died from measles at the age of seven, and Neal suffered a series of catastrophic strokes that put her in a coma for three weeks and left her temporarily paralysed.

Dahl’s daughter Tessa, the second of the couple’s five children, found him remote and controlling. It is no coincidence that her 1988 novel Working for Love deals with a problematic daughter-father relationship.

‘Daddy gave joy to millions of children,’ Tessa has said, ‘but I was dying inside.

‘Even though he was present for me physically, he was not emotionally. It was just bad luck, jolly bad luck, that I had been present both for my brother’s accident and my mother’s strokes. That my older sister Olivia had been the love of Daddy’s life. That both of us contracted measles, but that she had died.’ 

When the second world war broke out, he joined the RAF and crashed in the Libyan desert, sustaining a head injury that would cause him pain for the rest of his life

Dahl, pictured here in 1960, ‘liked to say things he didn’t mean just to get a reaction’ according to the Jewish film director Steven Spielberg

If the picture that emerges seems largely removed from the fictional landscapes Dahl conjured, it should be acknowledged that even his writing for children was inflected with a darker side. 

Many have detected misogyny in his portrayal of characters like Miss Trunchbull, the  headmistress of Crunchem Hall primary school in Matilda, while the ostensibly benign chocolatier Willy Wonka is one of numerous figures in Dahl’s oeuvre who betrays a more sinister side. And even Dahl tempered his initial portrayal of Wonka’s Oompa Loompas as black pygmies. 

Yet any consideration of the author’s legacy should not overlook the personal trials he endured. Born in 1916, Dahl was just three years old when his father died. At the age of nine, he was sent to boarding school and hated every moment. He left at 17 and went adventuring in Africa.

When the second world war broke out, he joined the RAF and crashed in the Libyan desert, sustaining what he described as ‘a monumental bash on the head’. The injury would cause him pain for the rest of his life, and perhaps went some way to explaining his cantankerous nature.

John Lithgow and Elliot Levey in Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London

Lithgow’s Dahl talks to the American publisher Jessie Stone, played by Aya Cash, in Giant

None of which excuses Dahl’s unsavoury views, of course, and it is perfectly legitimate to wonder whether his barnstorming success as a children’s author would have been achieved had his personal beliefs been public knowledge.

Even Steven Spielberg, the Jewish director of 1993 Holocaust drama Schindler’s List, was unaware of Dahl’s past when he filmed The BFG. Notably, though, Spielberg refused to condemn the author on learning the truth. 

‘Dahl liked to say things he didn’t mean just to get a reaction,’ said Spielberg. ‘All his comments about bankers, all the old-fashioned, mid-1930s stereotypes we hear from Germany – he would say for effect, even if they were horrible things.’

How then should Dahl be remembered? Was he a monster, a magician – or merely a man of contradictions? Jeremy Treglown, the author of a 1993 biography of Dahl, inclined to the last of those possibilities. 

‘He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies,’ Treglown wrote in Roald Dahl: A Biography. ‘He was also a fantasist, an anti-semite, a bully and a self-publicising troublemaker.’

As Giant hits the West End, audiences will once again have the chance to make up their own minds – but the man who plays him has no doubt. 

‘Dahl wasn’t a monster covered in scales,’ said Lithgow. ‘He was a very complicated man damaged by terrible tragedies.’ 

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