John Lithgow

Yes.

It's set in 1983, but it's about the events of 1982 when Israel was in deep conflict with Lebanon, mainly because they were trying to purge the PLO from Beirut.

And they invaded Beirut brutally and brutally.

Dahl wrote a book review a year later of a book about that invasion, which very much took the Palestinians' side.

And in that review, he betrayed his own anti-Semitism between the lines and in a few of the lines quite explicitly.

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 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.