Free Speech and Literature: Literature and Offence
Mon 10 Mar 2025 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM GMT
Online, Zoom
Description
Mark Rosenblatt, author of the new play Giant, in conversation with Dr Monika Smialkowska.
Is theatre still the ideal venue for exploring challenging, complex and even potentially offensive topics?
Set in the early 80s, shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Giant is a fictionalised account of the circumstances leading up to an interview that Roald Dahl gave in which he expressed a series of explicitly antisemitic opinions. Although the play was devised, and work on it had begun, before 7 October 2023, the issues it deals with have once again become critically relevant given the events of the past several months. More broadly, the play is being staged in an era where controversies over 'offensive literature' often make the headlines, and where debates about antisemitism have a very recent and raw past in British politics. In this conversation, the playwright Mark Rosenblatt will discuss the relationship between literature, politics and offence.
About Mark Rosenblatt
Mark Rosenblatt is a writer and director for stage and screen. His acclaimed debut play, Giant, opened at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs in September 2024. Directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring John Lithgow, Giant transfers to The Harold Pinter Theatre in Spring 2025.
As a freelance theatre director, Mark has worked across the UK, in the West End and internationally since 1998. He was Associate Director at Leeds Playhouse from 2013-16, an Associate Artist there till 2020, and Associate at the National Theatre Studio from 2011-2013 where he ran the Directors Department and developed new work. He won the JMK Young Directors Award in 1999 and served as a JMK Trustee (and later Vice-Chair) for sixteen years.
In 2001, Mark founded Dumbfounded Theatre to rediscover forgotten classics from the international repertoire. Its work included his acclaimed productions of CP Taylor’s Bread and Butter (Traverse, Dundee Rep, Tricycle) and Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi, adapted by Samuel Adamson (Arcola Theatre).
As a filmmaker, Mark’s work includes the award-winning short film Ganef (writer/director), which sold to HBO Europe and Oscar-qualified for the Live Action Short category in 2022. He co-wrote Dominic Dromgoole’s feature film debut Making Noise Quietly, adapted (with Nick Drake and Robert Holman) from Holman’s play. It was theatrically released in UK cinemas in 2019 by Verve Pictures. He is currently writing a new feature screenplay for Good Chaos, Film 4 & MUBI.
About Monika Smialkowska
Monika Smialkowska is Assistant Professor in Early Modern Literature at Northumbria University. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Tercentenary: Staging Nations and Performing Identities in 1916 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She published articles in English Literary Renaissance, Critical Survey, Shakespeare, and English, as well as chapters in volumes such as The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the North, and Shakespeare at War: A Material History. She is the co-editor, with Edmund G. C. King, of Memorialising Shakespeare: Commemoration and Collective Identity, 1916-2016.