John Lithgow

And it caused a minor controversy then, which over the years grew into a bigger and bigger controversy about Roald Dahl because that was the time when he basically admitted to being very anti-Semitic.

And, yes, the setup is that at the same time, his publishers, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in America and Jonathan Cape in London, they're about to release his new book, The Witches, which would be his fifth book.

And they've all been sensational successes.

And they were very worried that this one wouldn't sell because of the controversy he'd stirred.

So that's the setup.

They are there to get him to back down and apologize and explain and rationalize what he's written.

And he wants nothing to do with that.

Yeah, it sort of throws an audience off balance no matter what their political leanings and feelings are.

You know, you back away from the phrase villain, and I appreciate that.

We don't want him just to be the villain of the piece, but he's a dark character or he's a character with a very dark side.

But the play becomes this ferocious debate between him and this young American Jewish woman from a New York publishing house.

And that debate is extremely articulate.

It's very passionate on both sides.

In the case of...

Dahl's side of the argument, the argument is polluted by anti-Semitism.

But he's right on occasion.

He's like a broken clock.

And the audience, I mean, up on the stage, you can almost hear their anxiety trying to grapple this.

Mm-hmm.

I deliberately don't quote it in interviews because it has such power in performance.