Mark Rosenblatt: The Yorkshire playwright making it big with debut play Giant

‘Toast of London’, the subject of the email, is a reference to the Matt Berry Channel 4 comedy, but it’s far from just a joke.

There are few playwrights who are quite the toast of the capital in the way that Rosenblatt is right now. ‘Toast of London’ is an apt subject to be sending to him right now.

The facts are as follows: his debut play is in the West End with seats starting - yes, starting - at £200 per seat (rising to £375, although good luck getting one of those).

Rosenblatt’s play stars double Oscar-nominee, Emmy Award-winning John Lithgow, it’s directed by the man who used to run the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, and it won three Olivier’s at this year’s awards ceremony, including Best New Play, for Rosenblatt.

And did I mention that it’s his debut play - as in the literal first play he’s ever written?

“I don’t quite understand how it’s happening, I definitely didn’t set out writing this thinking this would happen and this was how it was going to play out. I’d have to be a very ego-centric person if I thought any of this would come to pass. Not that I’m without ego, but, yeah,” says a slightly bewildered Rosenblatt.

Not just ego-centric. You’d have to be completely delusional to imagine this kind of response to your debut play. It’s a ‘practicing your Oscar-acceptance speech’ in the shower dream, but for Rosenblatt, it’s actually come true.

He seems to be a little disorientated by the stratospheric journey of the last few years, several times pointing out that he’s not being disingenuous when I push him on some of the details, questioning if he really hadn’t prepared for such success.

“It had never occurred to me to try to be a playwright. I thought writing plays was something other people did,” he says.

So how has this happened? Rosenblatt might now be one of the hottest playwrights in the land, but when he was more regularly on these pages he appeared as associate director at what was then the West Yorkshire, now Leeds, Playhouse, from 2013 to 2020.

And, while it might be overstating it to say that he owes all the success to Yorkshire, the truth is Rosenblatt is the theatre artist he is because of the time he spent at the theatre in a key period of his development.

“It was 2018 and I had this idea for a play. Before I started working in Leeds, I’d had a couple of years working at the National when Nick Hytner was running it and I got to know him a little bit.

"Not well, but he was the big boss when I was there so it meant I was able to have a coffee with him and run the idea by him,” says Rosenblatt.

At the time, Hytner had left the National Theatre and was running another London venue, The Bridge.

“I was just thinking that he might provide a place for the development of this idea into a play and if he thought it was good then it would have more credentials,” says Rosenblatt.

“My thinking was that it would make it a bit more plausible if he said the idea was good when I went looking for a playwright to turn the idea into a play. He said ‘why don’t you write it’.”

Now, before you start thinking this is completely as outlandish as Rosenblatt himself seems to think, it’s important to revisit his credentials. I remind him that he was a seasoned director with a lot of pretty impressive credits to his name.

“I do get that, but I’d never written anything before, I had no ambition to be a playwright, I just thought my job was to work as a director with writers to bring their scripts to the stage.”

Hytner clearly had a different take.

“The subtext of his question was that he felt what I was describing was in my head and he did say he didn’t think he’d get another playwright to write clearly what was in my head.”

So he started to write. The killer idea Rosenblatt had involved a lot of different elements, but at its heart it remains the story that transferred to the stage of the Royal Court, then to the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End, where it’s currently playing for another couple of weeks.

It goes like this: in the summer of 1983, a very grumpy Roald Dahl is in the middle of having his house renovated and he has written an article reviewing a book which looks at the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The controversy won’t die down and his publisher needs it to because they are about to print The Witches, so they send an agent to try to convince Dahl to make a public apology for the anti-semitic language he used in his review.

“I just thought it was a really great scenario for a play, you have this very famous, beloved children’s author dealing with the fallout of a crisis of his own making,” says Rosenblatt.

“You have one person from his UK publishers, one from his American publishers trying to get him to make some kind of apology partly because they both happen to be Jewish and they care, but also because they’re worried about the Witches and they want to sell as many copies as possible and it all happens amidst the chaos of his domestic life.

“I thought it was a good, rich idea and Nick thought so too.” And how.

Once the play was written, over a period of a couple of years, ‘Nick’ liked the play so much he said he wanted to direct it.

“I had a couple of names in mind to play Dahl, just British actors who I had on a sort of ideas board, so when he said the name of this very famous American actor, well, I’d never thought of him because, well mainly because I’m not mad,” says Rosenblatt.

“But it was a brilliant idea because John does bear more than a passing resemblance to Dahl and he’s very tall and of course he’d played Churchill so brilliantly in The Crown so Nick sent the play to him and he said yes pretty much straight away.

“Then suddenly it’s escalating, and each moment feels completely surreal and if I look back at what’s happened I do sort of get altitude sickness. I just really don’t take any of it for granted, but once Nick is attached and then John and then the Royal Court, it sort of picks up its own momentum.”

It’s a momentum that carried Rosenblatt to the Oscars of the British Theatre world at this year’s Olivier Awards, where John Lithgow said: “Giant is one of the best experiences I’ve ever had on stage, this is largely thanks to some very dear friends, some old, some new…our debut playwright Mark Rosenblatt.”

A little while earlier at the ceremony that evening, John Lithgow’s friend Rosenblatt had collected his own statuette for Best New Play and referenced the contentiousness at the heart of a play about anti-semitism. The fact that the play was programmed on October 5, 2023, was in many ways awful timing.

“After the events of October 7, the Royal Court would have been well within their rights to put a pause on things, but they were unerring in their commitment to making this play.”

It was, clearly, the right decision.

“I’ve worked in the industry as a director for a long time and you have moments of success and moments where it’s quieter and where you can’t get arrested.”

Then there are moments like the one Rosenblatt is living in now, when you’re the toast of London theatre. Giant is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until August 2.