Reviewed by James Karas
“Human kind
cannot bear very much reality” wrote T. S. Eliot and the statement holds true
about many situations and most forcefully perhaps about the Holocaust. It is
not just unbearable; it is simply beyond comprehension.
The Stratford
Festival is not shying away from the subject and has produced the harrowing
story of Anne Frank in a production presumably aimed at children. The
Diary of Anne Frank is part of the Schulich Children’s Plays. No one
can doubt, however, that the powerful story about the young girl who kept a
diary while hiding from the Nazis and perished in one of the Third Reich’s
concentration camps is a play for everyone.
Members of the company in The Diary of Anne Frank.
Photography by David Hou.
The play begins
with seventeen actors lined up across the stage at the Avon Theatre. Each
introduces himself/herself and tells a pointed or humorous story. Some of them represent
the characters in the play while others form the “Chorus”, the actors who read
brief entries of the diary.
All the actors
wear beige, almost identical clothes. The set is panelled with light brown panes
and looks like a box. In this attic eight people are hidden and they live in
terror of being discovered. For example, they must be deathly quiet during the
day when a business is operating below. There is also shortage of food, tension
and hope, hope that the war will be over and they can return home.
Anne (Sara Farb) is lively teenager who
argues with her mother, adores her father and is growing up emotionally and
physically. Farb gives us a highly sympathetic young girl who is full of life
and ambition and lives in a nightmarish situation.
Her father Otto
is a man of wisdom, patience and love as he tries to maintain peace and
tolerance in an almost impossible situation. Joseph Ziegler does an outstanding
job in the role.
His wife (played
by Lucy Peacock) is a decent woman who has her limitations. She has to deal with
Anne and her older daughter Margot (Shannon Taylor) as well as the van Daans, (Kevin
Bundy and Yanna McIntosh). Mrs. van Daan is attached to her fur coat and Mr.
van Daan resorts to stealing bread.
The diary is a
simple story. Eight people hiding and facing their virtues and vices in the
face of serious deprivations. But that is just the surface, we know that they
are all facing ultimate evil and want desperately to escape from it. We know
that they will not and near the end we get a passing description of their fate.
Otto Frank survived the concentration camp and later found Anne’s diary.
The ultimate
evil that they faced is beyond comprehension and it is the type of reality that
Eliot had in mind when he penned the above-noted words.
Director Jillian
Keiley gives an understated and sensitive production of a situation that
screams with implicit horror. The actors who speak directly to the audience at
the beginning of the performance and the actors who read from the diary, the
Chorus, are a way of giving us some distance from the story. This is the
Brechtian idea of epic theatre where we are told a story rather than being led
to believe that we are watching an enactment of reality.
A painful
encounter with reality and a great night at the theatre.
______
The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances
Goodrich and Albert Hackett, adapted by Wendy Kesselmam, opened on May 28 and
will run in repertory until October 10, 2015 at the Avon Theatre, Stratford,
Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca
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