‘Giant shows us what it’s like to be British and Jewish’ - The Jewish Chronicle

Although the latest staging of Mark Rosenblatt’s celebrated play Giant, which exposes the shocking antisemitism of national treasure Roald Dahl, will soon come to an end in the West End (don’t delay if you can afford the high cost of the dynamic pricing tickets) a future life for Nicholas Hytner’s production on Broadway surely beckons.

However, if the show, which stars American actor John Lithgow as the British author, does end up in New York, it will be playing to an audience who may not appreciate quite so well as their British counterparts one of the most telling aspects in the play; the condition of being both British and Jewish. This rarely seen on-stage insight arrives with this speech by Dahl’s real-life Jewish agent Tom Maschler, played by Elliot Levey: “Every Jew who got out [of Nazi Germany] is a flag-waving Israeli? Sorry to disappoint,” it begins. It goes on to relate what it is like for British Jews who are widely seen as somehow accountable for the actions of Israel and who are challenged at parties as if they are “the f*cking [Israeli] ambassador. As if I need to make my position clear or maybe perhaps leave. The room, or the f*cking country, it’s hard to say.”

Though set in 1983, it is a speech that reflects a question – or test – which is increasingly experienced by British Jews and one, which if not answered correctly, potentially exposes them to vocal or violent abuse should the response not be deemed appropriately anti-Israel.

“Mark Rosenblatt has played a blinder,” says Levey in his dressing room ahead of going on stage as Maschler. “Because without being schematic the speech is so embedded in character it articulates the Anglo-Jewish response to being a Jew.”

Levey is having the latest in a series of moments. His Maschler resulted in his second Olivier Award. His first was for his deeply moving Herr Schultz in the current production of Cabaret. This was followed by his heart-wrenching Morris opposite David Tennant’s Nazi John Halder in Good, CP Taylor’s harrowing play about corrupted decency.

I hate myself for being so affected by my success. The joy of winning is disgusting

Levey is refreshingly honest about embracing success with almost unseemly glee.

“I hate myself for being so affected by it. The joy of winning is disgusting.”

Back to the character he is about to perform, his Maschler represents a “disappearing” kind of British Jewishness.

“It’s partly generational, partly the events in the Middle East and also partly the decline of an idea of Britishness which galvanised my grandparents’ generation,” explains Levey.

“They came in [to Britain] off boats and trains desperate to anglicise,” he continues while sat with his back to his makeup mirror. “They had the baggage of victimhood because it was the Second World War or, as with some of my ancestors, the baggage of pogroms and poverty. They wanted to reinvent themselves, anglicise their names and ferociously become Englishmen.”

Levey’s grandfather Elia Zivatofsky was one such. As Levey related in his first Olivier Award thank you speech, Elia never quite succeeded in disguising his Jewishness when he choose Levey as his new name.

“I never met him, but my father told me he was a ridiculously Russian Yiddish-sounding man.”

However, other Jews made the transition to Englishness more completely. Maschler was one. Pinter, after whom the theatre in which we are sitting is named, was another. Levey remembers working with the Nobel laureate on a short play. “Harold would come in and start the day the way Harold Pinter sounds – patrician, old-school English. And then as the whiskies disappeared, to my mind and ear he turned into Hackney’s [Jewish] Harry Pinter. He was as cantankerous and opinionated and terrifying as he was before, but his voice revealed that he was what he didn’t want to be. We’ve all been there. After two pints I’m a Jewish boy from Leeds. You can only fight it so long.”

The Jew emerging from a well-rehearsed Englishness is something that Levey conveys with a nuance that again American audiences may not quite detect.

His version of Maschler – the brilliant publisher who in real life discovered Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 – “play acts at being this sort of patrician English publisher,” says Levey. “Yet when Roald Dahl eventually provokes him, Maschler’s performative persona eventually comes out. He starts waving his hands around and he becomes Tom Maschler, the Jew.”

If Levey is right in saying that Maschler’s brand of post-war British Jewishness is disappearing, so is the ability to express Jewish identity in the way Maschler does in the play.

“It’s almost impossible,” says the actor who will soon be seen on TV as Jewish detective Ernest Bliss in Mark Gatiss’s thriller Bookish, set in bombed London in 1946. Levey resumes filming for the series the day after Giant’s run finishes.

“Maschler’s opinion in today’s climate would be seen as some sort of fifth columnist among our community,” he continues. “It would be [seen as] self-hating’; as shonda [Yiddish for dishonourable].”

Yet Levey is not saying that such a response to his character, who shudders at the idea of living with millions of other Jews, is wrong.

“It’s natural,” he says. “We [Jews] are in a state of war and I think it’s perfectly natural for people to be reluctant to express an opinion which haters could pounce on and use against us.” As an increasingly well-known figure, Levey feels a responsibility to avoid encouraging the kind of hostile environment that was allowed to thrive at Glastonbury.

As the whiskies disappeared, Harold Pinter’s voice revealed that he was what he didn’t want to be. We’ve all been there

“If we’re in a place where Kneecap can go to Glastonbury, I think we’re in a place where nobody needs to hear some actor say anything that they can be used against us. Yes, that’s self-censorship. But while we are up against it, and while the world hates us, I’m happy to censor myself.”

Apart from the rising physical threats to Jews, Levey sees a spiritually existential one. It is a fear that emerged for the actor when President Trump announced his “Gaza Riviera” idea, a moment the 51-year-old describes as the “biggest psychological moment for Jews since October 7”.

As he continues, it as if he has experienced the chilling prescience of a reluctant prophet.

“When Trump announced his Gaza Riviera, I felt a sickness in my bones. It changed something within me, and I think we’re in an interim period where diaspora, Jewry, Anglo Jewry, British Jewry are faced with something that may be unprecedented in our time since the creation of the state of Israel.”

We are, feels Levey, living in a moment that threatens what he describes as the Jewish soul.

“I have this terrible fear – not a certainty – that something could happen to us that puts that Jewish soul in jeopardy. That, for me, is as much an existential threat to the Jewish people as Iran and its proxies. It is a fear that we lose sight of the thing that we yearned for since 70 AD.”

Giant is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 2

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Topics:

Theatre

Antisemitism