'Utterly fearless' play confronts Roald Dahl's 'vile antisemitism'

The Royal Court has a monster hit on its hands, with this absorbing, "stylishly crafted" and very timely play, said Clive Davis in The Times. The setting is Buckinghamshire, 1983. Roald Dahl is about to publish his latest children's book, "The Witches". But he's just written a review of a book about the recent Israeli siege of Beirut, in which he crossed the line from criticism of Israeli policy into antisemitism.

Written by the theatre director Mark Rosenblatt, "Giant" imagines a crisis meeting to discuss the fallout, involving Dahl's real-life publisher, Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape, and Jessie Stone, the fictitious sales director for his US publisher. Both are Jewish. ("She one of your gang?" asks Dahl of Maschler.) Will he agree to issue an apology, or will he seek to brazen it out?

Rosenblatt's debut is "spectacularly good", said Tim Bano in the London Evening Standard – and utterly fearless. It confronts head-on the beloved children's author's "vile antisemitism" while "sweeping along in its ferocious cross-currents of dialogue all the pitched battles of society today: authors with controversial opinions; art versus artist; complicity and silence; the ways we protect the powerful".

But what makes the evening, directed by Nicholas Hytner, really "extraordinary" are the performances. John Lithgow is uncannily good as Dahl: charming, witty and wise, but also restless and irritable. Romola Garai's Jessie holds herself tightly, but there is a "profound dignity to her", especially when "in a quavering voice she defends the Jewish people" from Dahl's "outrageous statements". By contrast, Maschler (Elliot Levey) is "laidback", seemingly bent on appeasing and protecting his author.

Dahl's "bizarre blend of kindness and borderline sadism" is brilliantly conveyed here, said Alice Saville in The Independent. But, ultimately, the play lacks tension, because it's clear from the start that he won't change.

Once the full extent of his bigotry is laid bare, the play doesn't seem to know where to go, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. But the journey to that point makes for riveting, brave and intelligent drama. "This is what theatre is for."

by Sally Rooney   

In certain quarters, a "Sally Rooney backlash" has been building, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The Irish writer's novels – most famously, "Normal People" – are, some say, "too white" and "a bit corny". No doubt her staggering commercial success also "rankles". Yet her new novel should silence the doubters: "wise, resonant and witty", "Intermezzo" is a book I admired "almost without reservation".

It tells the story of two brothers: Peter, a successful Dublin barrister in his early 30s, and "shyer, geekier" Ivan, ten years younger, who "wears ceramic braces and plays competitive chess". Both are in mourning for their father, who recently died from cancer. As ever, love is the "primary subject". Peter is "caught between two women" – serious Sylvia, his long-time girlfriend, and the "more feral" Naomi, who is 23. Ivan is falling for an older arts-centre worker named Margaret. Inevitably, there is lots of (superbly described) sex, along with "fluid and exact" writing about chess and exquisitely well-perceived emotion. I spent a couple of days with the book, and it "made my burdens feel lighter".

This is Rooney's "richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements", said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Gone is the self-consciousness that bedevilled her last novel, "Beautiful World, Where Are You". Here, she "leans fully into her gifts". There is something "electrically compelling" about the way that defining events in the brothers' shared past – notably their parents' divorce – play out in the present. "The reader always feels different layers of grief at play – buried pain exhumed by fresh hurt – in a way that feels stingingly true to life."

But there's also room for "little comic touches" – many in a subplot involving Ivan's dog. "Intermezzo", like Rooney's previous novels, is marked by an "inhibiting fastidiousness", said James Marriott in The Times. People are forever "mentioning Wittgenstein and Henry James", without any signs that Rooney finds this insufferable. And despite their romantic difficulties, all the characters, deep down, are "relentlessly honourable". At times, the prose is "mannered and wilfully archaic": some sections are written in a "sub-Joycean stream-of-consciousness style".

Much about this novel is indeed easy to parody, said Claire Lowdon in The Spectator. And yet it was a book "I always wanted to return to". For all the fancy trappings, Rooney writes "simple, heart-warming moral tales full of sex". As long as you don't approach "Intermezzo" expecting high literature, you'll almost certainly have a "good time".

Versatile actress who conquered stage and screen

In a career spanning eight decades, Maggie Smith won two Oscars, five Baftas, four Emmys, a Tony and an honorary Olivier – among many other awards, said The Telegraph. Theatregoers were captivated by her performances, in everything from "Othello" to "Lettice and Lovage"; and though the stage was her natural home, she was also a film star. She came to Hollywood's attention in 1963, with a scene-stealing turn in "The V.I.P.s". 

And yet, said The Times, when critics and admirers tried to define her qualities as an actress, they struggled. ''Very tall, very thin … with all this red hair," observed the playwright Beverley Cross, on seeing her Viola in a production of "Twelfth Night" in 1952, when he was 21. He fell in love with Smith and eventually became her second husband.

With her impeccable timing, she excelled at comic grandes dames; and yet could also be primly middle class. And as she got older, critics noted her ability to capture loneliness, anguish and fear, such as in Alan Bennett's "Bed Among the Lentils".

Margaret Smith was born in Ilford, Essex, and brought up in Oxford. Her mother was a secretary from Glasgow; her father was a lab technician. There were no actors in the family, but as a child, Margaret had read "The Swish of the Curtain", Pamela Brown's novel about the theatre, and she became convinced that acting was what she had to do. On leaving school at 16, she joined the Oxford Playhouse, and at 18 she made her debut in "Twelfth Night", under the auspices of the university's dramatic society. She appeared in numerous productions in Oxford in the early 1950s, said The Guardian. Ned Sherrin, in whose revues she starred, noted that "at that time in Oxford, if you wanted a show to be a success, you had to try and get Margaret Smith in it".

As Maggie Smith (Margaret was already taken), she made her Broadway debut in "New Faces of '56", and her West End one a year later, in Bamber Gascoigne's "Share My Lettuce". She then gravitated to more serious roles and, in 1963 – a year after she won the first of her six Evening Standard Awards – Laurence Olivier invited her to join his new National Theatre company. Olivier, wrote Michael Coveney, soon realised that in Smith, he had met his match. She starred opposite him in several productions, including "The Master Builder" and "Othello". She reprised the role of Desdemona for Olivier's 1965 film, which garnered her an Oscar nomination. She won her first Oscar for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969). Years later, the Edinburgh-based writer J.K. Rowling suggested she be cast as Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter films; Smith referred to the part as "Jean Brodie in a witch's hat".

Following the collapse of her marriage to the actor Robert Stephens in 1974, she married Cross and moved to Canada, to spend four seasons with the Stratford Festival in Ontario. This brought her closer to Hollywood, and in 1979 she won her second Oscar, for "California Suite". In the UK, she was increasingly cast in period films, including 1984's "A Private Function". 

Owing to periods of ill health, she did not act on stage for many years, but in 2019, at the age of 85, she made a triumphant final appearance in Christopher Hampton's one-hander "A German Life", about Goebbels's secretary.

Meanwhile, she kept busy with screen work, said The New York Times. Having excelled as a countess with a taste for lethal put-downs in Robert Altman's "Gosford Park" (2001), scripted by Julian Fellowes, she was a natural to play Lady Crawley in Fellowes's TV show "Downton Abbey". As the clan gathered at the dowager's death bed, she delivered a final glorious put-down: "Stop that noise. I can't hear myself die." Cross died in 1998. Her sons, the actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, survive her.