Anne Being Frank

Anne Frank’s diaries were left behind in the Amsterdam attic where she and her Jewish family were hiding, until they were betrayed to the Gestapo. 

All perished in concentration camps except for Anne’s Dad, Otto, who published the teenager’s diaries in 1947.  We know he edited out her occasional spiteful attacks and gossip, and her sexual fantasies and first experiences, keeping her an innocent. 

Ron Elisha’s solo 2023 play - with an enthralling Alexis Fishman - goes further imagining Anne in Bergen Belsen, continuing to write on paper scraps smuggled in by a gormless guard she calls Pimples.  She describes him taking his daily payment in sex, her abortion with barbwire, and the horrific sights in that hellish camp. 

Fishman is physically remarkable playing an articulate, egocentric teenager overflowing with contradictory opinions and enthusiasm.  And later she’s  harrowing as the emaciated 15 year old witness of hell itself.

Elisha projects that Anne somehow survives the war and is re-writing and updating her diaries.  Perhaps now, she realises, her famous line from the original may have to go: “I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

But her battles now are in New York with her publisher “Mr Bowtie”. He insists that her new entries be expurgated of all dark and violent realities, so nothing blemishes her innocent persona.  Fishman leaps humorously between Anne and Mr Bowtie, as we see this saccharine censorship of wartime - and Jewish - truths.  

Elisha’s leaps in time and place, between the real and imagined diaries, can be discordant or confusing, and would be freer on a more abstract, less cluttered stage design (Jacob Battista).  Amanda Brooke Lerner directs a pacy 90 minutes during which Fishman’s quicksilver shifts never loses our attention. 

Martin Portus

Photographer: Grant Leslie