Claustrophobia
The Diary of Anne Frank. (Phenix.)
ADAPTATIONS are in general ne'er-do-wells. They are apt to lounge about keeping just abreast of the plot, reducing characters who in the mind's eye had stature and reality to dwarfish dummies in greasepaint, stealing cur- tain lines from thin air and planting climaxes where none should be, distorting form and forging substance. Like most maladjusted persons they are usually the victims of circum- stance. Take the diary of an adolescent girl immured with her Jewish family, refugees from the Gestapo, in a loft in Amsterdam during two years of the last war. How could a diary make a dramatically satisfying play? It surely could take form as a whole only if the writer knew how it was going to end or could at least alter it afterwards; it is in the nature of diaries that this cannot be so.
And yet The Diary of Anne Frank turns out to be one of the two, or at most three, genuinely affecting plays on in London at present. It breaks the cardinal rule of tragedy, for its heroes remain essentially unchanged, one does not feel that they are hammered and tempered by their ordeal; they are life-size people reacting as life-size people often do to appalling tensions—with fear and trembling, a little heroism and a lot of irritation. Charac- ters who do not develop, and a form, of its essence undramatic, are unpromising material. How has the transformation on them been worked? Strangely enough by keeping close to the original. When the dramatisers, Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, arc at their most theatrical they are at their, least convincing, in particular, where a facile moral is drawn at the end. But they have mostly realised that horror can be built up of very ,small particles—the unbearable claustrophobia, the hothouse emo- tional atmosphere, the endless bickering over absurd trifles, the moments of vacuum when a bell rings, the wild hopes and despairs. These do not make the rugged ups and downs of classical tragedy but a plateau of tension so high and breathless that the final drop from the precipice is a merciful release.
They are helped by some remarkable 'Acting. George Voskovec plays the father with tremen- dous conviction: he holds together the play as he held the family, by sheer force of character. Max Bacon and Mariam Karlin at the head of the other family are blowsy, greedy, charming, hysterical by turns and never show a join. Perlita Neilson is a little un- convincing in the early scenes where she is • perforce too much of the stage 'little girl,' but she later gets the measure of Anne's astringent tenderness. Frith Banbury's production and Boris Aronson's very effective doll's-house set turn the problem of having eight actors con- tinuously on the stage into a triumphant asset. Finally, of course, they have their subject on their side. We are far enough in time from the war to have recovered from the insensibility of shock but near enough in spirit for the blaze of recognition to be painful, not to say
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