StAge well set for Anne Frank story
Anne Frank never seems to be out of the news. The 15-year-old Jewish- German-Dutch girl died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in 1945 after hiding with her family and four other Jews for two years in an Amsterdam apartment, where she compiled her famous diary.
More than 70 years later, you can read a new book claiming to identify who betrayed the Franks and their companions to the Nazis, or a news item about previously hidden pages of Anne’s diary that contain dirty jokes.
The sheer humanity of the diary, the dramatic immediacy of its portraiture and its heartbreaking conclusion have made Anne’s story iconic. Hers is a vivid human face amid the overwhelming blur of Holocaust statistics. Fighting Chance Productions, a non-Equity company, stages its theatrical adaptation in the small, stuffy theatre at the back of the Havana restaurant, offering a passable suggestion of the Franks’ claustrophobic secret annex. Solid performances and intelligent direction give effective life to the strong story despite a couple of serious strategic errors.
Smart, precocious, fun-loving Anne, played with understated charm by Morgan Hayley Smith, is only 13 when forced to hide with older sister Margot (Diana Beairsto), father Otto (Cale Walde) and mother Edith (Gina Leon) in a secret apartment behind a wall of Otto’s office to avoid deportation to Auschwitz.
Joining them are Otto’s business partner Mr. Van Daan (Bruce Hill), his wife (Leanne Kuzminski) and their 16-year-old son Peter (Gabriele Metcalfe), all protected and kept fed by virtuous Christians Miep (Tori Fritz) and Mr. Kraler (Drew Hart). After a few months, grumpy Jewish dentist Dussel (Thomas King) also moves in.
Tensions arise over space, behaviour, noise, food (eventually they’re reduced to eating rotten potatoes) and worsen as the months drag on with the murderous Gestapo always just outside. Anne, though, retains her resilience and good humour, warming up and ultimately melting surly Peter as her own sexuality quietly blossoms. Anne’s relationship with her family is central to this version of the diary, some of which she narrates.
She’s jealous of her “perfect” sister, adores her almost saintly father but loathes her mother. This intense dislike seems especially irrational given the sweetness of Leon’s Edith.
Co-directors Allyson Fournier and Ryan Mooney stage the play on a bare floor in the round. Eight chairs comprise the only furniture, and the characters never leave except to go to their one shared bathroom (another The Diary of Anne Frank When: To June 23
Where: Havana Theatre, 1212 Commercial Dr.
Tickets & info: $20-$27; fightingchanceproductions.ca source of tension). The actors simply sit or stand and turn away in powerful tableaus to indicate that their character has left the common space.
Offstage sounds provide terrifying reminders of the nightmarish world beyond the shelter: a speech by Hitler to cheering crowds, sirens, a train rattling down the tracks. But we also unfortunately hear stagy Nazi speeches in English with bad German accents.
And the end of the play, an epilogue in which sole survivor Otto Frank explains what happened to everyone after their arrest, is seriously anticlimactic.
Whether this is the playwright’s decision (the program doesn’t indicate whose adaptation we’re watching) or the directors’, it undercuts the much stronger silent ending that echoes with Anne’s ironic, stirring final words.
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”