A new play at the Royal Court in London is set to explore World’s No 1 storyteller, Roald Dahl’s legacy and contradictions. Giant by Mark Rosenblatt takes place over the imagined course of an afternoon in 1983, in which Dahl must decide how to handle the scandal that could sink his career. A book review he has written for a literary magazine, comparing Isarel to Nazi Germany and called all Jews cowards if they don’t condemn the Israeli state, has caused quite a dismay. The Witches by Roald Dahl could well be his masterpiece, is about o come out and his New York publishers are getting irate. Jewish booksellers in the US are already threatening not to stock the new story. The 67-year-old author is under pressure to make a public apology. At Gypsy House, Dahl’s home om Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, fictional crisis talks were taking place. Publisher Tom Maschler, Jessie, an envoy from the sales team ( both Jewish)  and Dahl’s second wife , Liccy, converge over a deeply uncomfortable lunch of fine wines and Norwegian delicacies.

Rosenblatt, a 47-year-old theatre director turned playwright had been casting around for a way to explore criticism of Israel, racism against Jews and the conflation of the two. In Dahl’s book review, he found the prefect mirror to reflect the same arguments that are raging around Israel’s response to the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7.

Puffin confirmed that it had revised hundreds of words and phrases across many titles, changing Hags to crows in The Witches, replacing Rudyard Kipling with Jane Austen on Matilda’s reading list and making Augustus Gloop merely enormous instead of fat Salman Rushdie slammed the changed as absurd  censorship while others welcomed the updates.

In 1983, Roald Dahl was recently divorced from the Hollywood actress Patricia Neal and entering a purple patch as a children’s author, and previously having been preoccupied with previous vocations working for Shell in Tanzania, serving in the RAF during the Second World War and seducing the socialite wives of Washington DC, while spying  for MI6.

He was fiercely pro-Palestinian after his wartime experiences as a pilot based in Haifa. Naim Attallah, a flamboyant Palestinian publisher, commissioned Dahl to write a book review for his magazine Literary Review. The BFG had been published the previous year – the same year Israel invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut. In February 1983, an official inquiry concluded that Ariel Sharon, the then defence minister, bore personal responsibility for failing to prevent thousands of innocent civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Dahl was reviewing God Cried, a photography book about the invasion and its aftermath with a text by the war correspondent and Sunday Times journalist Tom Clifton. The review began “ in June 1941, O happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the mass slaughter of the Jews was beginning. Our hearts bled for the Jewish men, women and children, and we hated the Germans. Exactly 41-years later in June 1982, the Israeli forces were streaming northwards out of what used to be  Palestine into Lebanon and the mass slaughter of the inhabitants began. Our hearts bled for the Lebanese  and Palestine men, women and children, and we all started hating the Israelis. Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly  from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers. 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 to hatred  and revulsion”.

Rosenblatt says: ”Dahl takes pleasure in the language he uses to describe things that feel very hurtful. What I wanted to was write something that was both nuanced and even-handed about the issues around Israel and Palestine, and also about the difference between meaningful discourse around that and antisemitic stereotyping. I also wanted to try to find what was incredibly generous and subtle and heartfelt about him as a man  – but also where his cruelty lay, and how and why it was difficult for people to operate around him.  Roald Dahl endured family tragedies, his daughter Olivia died of measles when she was seven, his son, Theo suffered serious brain injury as a baby when a taxi hit his pram, while Neal suffered a series of debilitating aneurysms. Pretty well everybody who edited him and published him was Jewish, and he was friends with them, until he fell out  with pretty well  all his publishers,  But that didn’t seem to affect his general outlook, which was that all Jews were Zionists, and all Zionists wanted to get rid of Palestinians”. Roald Dahl died in 1990, Netflix bought the rights to all his work three years ago in a deal rumoured to be worth £500 million. There are new projects which the streaming company is developing are two animated series by Taika Waititi based on the world of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.   

The American John Lithgow will play Dahl in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner.