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Jessie Stone and the balance of our sympathies
One of the creative triumphs of the play is Mark’s invention of the character of the young publisher Jessie Stone. In the to and fro of her relationship with Dahl the balance of our sympathies is serially tested. For much of the time we empathise with the professional and personal challenge she faces as she tries to tiptoe through the minefield that is the issue at hand and Dahl’s belligerent behaviour. From the off he is provocative and patronising, informed by his assumed superiority as the star author, and her lowly status in the publishing hierarchy, no doubt underlined by her being a woman. His aggression towards her initially feels unwarranted, as she attempts as cautiously as possible just to do her job. But, when she suggests that some have interpreted the witches in his new book as an allegory of stereotypical demon Jews who print money and kill children, we surely think, as Dahl does, that she has gone too far, and side with him when he says, “Talk about seeing it where it isn’t.”

Dahl’s caustic condescension is also balanced by evidence of his compassion, particularly in his intuiting that Jessie’s son Archie is brain damaged because she lets slip that she still reads to him when he is fifteen years old. He has genuine empathy for her based on his own experience with his disabled son, and even when the feud between he and Jessie has reached fever pitch, he chooses to write a positive personal message in Archie’s copy of the book, and encourages her to keep reading to him, saying “Reading is great medicine.”

In the back and forth of their arguments, however, he turns cruel and petty when he discovers that she has concealed the fact that she has not flown in from New York especially to visit him, but was already in the UK on holiday. He threatens to have her fired, and she responds in kind referring to the history of his turbulent relationships with his publishers. In fact, in real life Dahl had previously fallen out with his US publisher Alfred Knopf over contractual matters, although it was the publisher themselves who initiated the split, being finally fed up with having to deal with such a difficult author. Dahl’s former editor at Knopf wrote to him in unflinching terms: You have behaved to us in a way I can honestly say is unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility…(and)…unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to publish you.”  Jessie Stone’s taunt to him about how “the entire staff cheered when they heard the news” that the publisher had dropped him because he had been “vile to them”, echoes the true story. At the time the play takes place, Dahl has arrived at his new publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who will publish The Witches. That relationship likewise did not endure, because five years later Dahl fell out with his editor there over their suggested corrections to the messy first draft of Matilda, which was ultimately published by yet another new publisher, Viking.

In the play it seems likely that Dahl will carry out his threat to demand that Jessie be fired, but she pre-empts him, telling him that she intends to resign in any case. She no longer wishes to compromise herself, and takes her future into her own hands, confident that she will be hired somewhere else where they will understand the moral balance of what happened in the argument with Dahl, and because of his previous reputation. In all of this discord, it is Dahl who comes out looking like the “belligerent, nasty child” as Jessie describes him, and she whose integrity remains.