Tuesday, October 08, 2024
John Lithgow: ‘The origins of Roald Dahl’s hatred fascinate me’
The Independent: If you’re lucky,” says John Lithgow, “an actor gets to speak a few lines in his career that you just absolutely know are going to have a terrific impact. And in this case I’m afraid it’s Roald Dahl. That’s a line that you cannot unhear.”
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3 comments:
It can be startling to learn that someone who has created works that mean so much and have positively impacted so many people is capable of voicing such hateful things. It raises the question of whether you can ever separate the artist from their art, when they reveal such a failing of character. After all, surely that part of them must come through in their work. I think of JK Rowling’s transphobic rhetoric, and how when you look closer at the Harry Potter books, concerning themes can be identified. It saddens me to think that turning a magnifying glass to Dahl’s work would probably reveal the same. I do think there’s some level of separation that is possible simply because art is subjective and interpretive –– you can choose to take something positive out of work created by someone whose beliefs are terrible, as long as you think critically and acknowledge and condemn the hateful roots. It’s a complicated question. I’m not sure what the right answer is.
John Lithgow is one of those actors that takes up good space on a screen or stage. He continually uses the roles he’s given to tell the story of something or someone that would not have been told otherwise. I think that this play Giant explores a topic that many people, even today, are still unsure about how to discuss. Which is why theatre is so magical to me, theatre can take any current social or political dialogue whether in the news or not and have a conversation about it on stage just by putting words on a stage. This play must be a most thought-provoking one to work for and one that is so timely in our day today. I think it must be hard for actors to play roles where the person they are portraying was a villain-type person, and how do actors keep their heads about them while still being able to accurately portray this character and tell the story. Theatre for many is magical, and so to have an actor like John Lithgow help breathe a story to life, it makes the experience of theatre much more intriguing.
I, like many children, grew up reading the stories of Roald Dahl and watching the many film adaptations. I didn’t learn about his many bigoted opinions until late middle school, and until then I didn’t pick up on the anti semitic caricatures present in many of his works. I think that this pattern of learning about the dark side of media we enjoyed as children is a common thing that people have to grapple with. I’ve always been passionate about the power of theater to make people really think, and this is another time that I believe art is important. If older children and adults grappling with their childhood media consumption see a production like this, it might help them to better understand what happened with the author and revisit some of their childhood characters through a new lens, or possibly learn new information about history. I think that Lithgow is going to do a phenomenal job in this role, and that with the exigency of the current situation with Gaza the show will have an even greater impact and outreach than normally.
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