I saw Dahl's racism first hand, but he shouldn't be cancelled

His views were abhorrent and shameful, but the bigger picture is complex

- Michael Coren

Many years ago I was a theatre critic, and over the years I’ve seen and written about plays of all sorts, from the powerful and provocative to the bland and banal. But I’ve never experienced the strange, eerie, even disturbing emotions that occurred recently when hearing my own name repeated and my own voice played on the stage of one of the world’s great theatres. But this is what happened at the press night of Giant at the Royal Court.

The play is written by Mark Rosenblatt and is about the famous children’s author Roald Dahl, who is played by the excellent John Lithgow. Mark contacted me three years ago, explained that he intended to write a drama about Dahl and his antisemitism, and asked if he could interview me. The reason was that in 1983, working at my first job in journalism at The New Statesman, I interviewed Dahl about a book review he’d written. The book was God Cried, about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but Dahl went much further than criticising Israel. He wrote of “a race of people” — the Jews — who had “switched so rapidly from victims to barbarous murderers”, and that the United States was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that “they dare not defy” Israel. I was surprised that he agreed to be interviewed but he seemed more than willing. The conversation started politely enough but then he said: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews.” And then: “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.” Pause. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” He then said that when he was in the armed forces during the Second World War, he and his friends never saw any Jewish fighting men.