The frivolous friend who hid Anne Frank
Laced with humour amid the tragedy, one of the darkest, most enduring stories of the Holocaust is retold through the eyes of...
PICK OF THE WEEK A SMALL LIGHT
Good drama is partly about hitting the right balance between light and dark, because a little bit of comedy makes tragedy hit all the harder. That said, humour isn’t something you’d expect to find in a TV drama about Anne Frank, but it’s there in A Small Light, and it’s all the better for it.
It tells her story over eight parts at one remove, through the life of Miep Gies (played by Bel Powley, left), one of the women who helped hide Anne and her family from the Nazis.
We first meet Miep in Amsterdam in 1933 as a frivolous type who spends her nights drinking and her days dreaming. One scene, in which she meets her future husband, Jan (Joe Cole), is flat-out hilarious. We cut from Miep flirting with him at a bar to her sudden, crashing disappointment at him then boring her to tears about Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Powley has an expressive face that’s perfectly suited to such comic moments but which also crumples movingly at sad points.
These steadily grow in number after she takes a job working for Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber), the father of Anne, which leads to her taking on the responsibility of bringing the family food as they go into hiding from the Nazis.
Even then, the drama’s commitment to a light touch remains. Miep and her husband find moments of joy in the difficulties, with him scheming to find extra ration books at work and her flirting with the butcher to get bigger chickens. Anne and her sister Margot feel very much like real children, too – they have comical tantrums, moon over boys and get sent to their rooms for complaining, all while eking out an extraordinarily tough existence, trying to live silently above an office where the door could be broken down at any moment.
Life goes on is the message, which makes those moments, when it suddenly seems like it might not, more powerful.
A rare night out for Miep and Jan with her friend Tess (played by Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson) and her new beau takes a handbrake turn from drunken jollity into stilted suspicion when a thorny topic comes up. You suddenly become aware that Miep and Jan can’t completely trust anyone, even someone with such a charming set of cheekbones as Tomlinson’s Tess.
What the drama leaves you with is a picture of how people operate in hardship, not as saints but as rounded individuals with hopes and doubts. It’s also a quiet hymn to the idea that one person – a small light, as it were – really can make a difference, even in the face of seemingly impossible odds.