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Funny, shocking and thought-provoking: John Lithgow's towering performance brings the big unfriendly giant who was Roald Dahl back to life in the West End

Anyone familiar with Roald Dahl 's beloved children's story The BFG will know that not all giants are Big and Friendly. Not least this enormously tall, hugely imaginative, massively successful giant of a writer.

In the course of Mark Rosenblatt’s bold, brilliant dramatic portrait of Dahl, he reveals him to be both less and more: a monstrously complicated, immensely flawed, childlike human being, paradoxically overflowing with infinite compassion and unrepentant hatred. John Lithgow, in a transcendent performance that has won awards (and will doubtless win more) towers magnificently over proceedings as Dahl: initially witty and impish, but little by little growing into his true self — a gigantic bully as grotesque as one of his own creations. ’It proved incendiary, prompting death threats against the author and necessitating police protection outside the country house he shared with his fiancée, Liccy (played here by Rachael Stirling, sensible and Sloaney, expertly massaging his back and his ego).

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