John Lithgow on the Controversial Authors Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. These past couple of weeks, I've encountered an age-old dilemma when it comes to the arts. Just recently I went to a stunning, a stunning performance at the Metropolitan Opera of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

For five hours I was transported by the music and the singing, and yet all the while I realized that the composer, Wagner, was a terrible anti Semite, a favorite of Adolf Hitler's, and the production, ironically enough, was by Juval Sharon, an innovator in modern opera and a Jew. Around the same time I attended a performance of Giant, Mark Rosenblatt's new play about the life loves, and repugnant politics of Rald Dahl. You leave the theatre thinking yet again, how is it possible for such a complicated and often hateful man to produce works of literature that are invariably described as beloved? How is it possible that the same imagination, the same person that conceived James and the giant peach and Charlie and the chocolate factory, could also give an interview in which he said, quote,

Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason. The play Giant dramatizes the scandal that erupted after Roldal had written a profoundly anti-Semitic article in 1983. The play premiered in London in 2024 and it opens now on Broadway with the great actor John Lithgow. Playing role Dahl. Dahl faces off against his American publisher who would like him to retract those anti-Semitic remarks.

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