Two rows of six over-sized photographs fill the void. Children. Smiling and laughing. But something about the quality of the images suggests otherwise. Blurred but recognisable. Drained of colour. Like bones protruding from earth. Or as the late Scottish Makar Edwin Morgan put it in his poem Skeleton Day: “Skull, ribs, hips emerge / from the dark like a caravan / Bound for who knows where”. But we know where these children are bound – a Nazi concentration camp, a gas chamber, a mass unmarked grave.

On the floor lie two standard-sized photographs of similarly happy but haunting faces, which swell in number over the forty-five minute course of About Turn Theatre Company’s powerful production of Grigori Frid’s rarely performed mono-opera The Diary of Anne Frank. Representative of family snaps, which adorn mantelpieces and bedside cabinets the world over from Rwanda and Bosnia to Cambodia and Darfur, they take on a deeper symbolism as the story unfolds to its heartbreaking conclusion. Gravestones. Memorials. A stark reminder to future generations that we should never forget what Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man” during the horrors of the Holocaust or more recent acts of genocide and mass atrocities.

From the girlish glee of opening “bunches of presents” on her thirteenth birthday and bashful blushes of being reprimanded by her teacher for chattering in class (“you can’t deny your very nature,” she protests, in a line, which holds greater significance given her Jewish faith in Nazi-controlled Holland) to her wide-eyed terror at the approaching footsteps of a Gestapo officer and gritted-teeth determination to “escape the dreaded fascist hand” in the hope that “All earthly cruelty must someday come to an end”, Vera Hiltbrunner is nothing short of excellent in matching the sharp highs of Grigori Frid’s score with the emotional depths of Sebastian Ukena‘s simple but effective direction.

Of the 19 named scenes (there were 21 in the original 1972 Moscow production), a few stand out. I Think Of Peter, in which she wonders if the boy whose hand “found mine in the silence” dreams about her in the same tender manner that she does of him. The rare moments when the spoken word takes precedence over the singing: “They will find us and shoot us”, “But I know it, I will never be free” which could have been highlighted more by the use of stillness, direct address, a slower delivery or a quietening or silencing of the piano by the impressive Stavroula Thoma. And Duet of the Van Daans, a comic re-enactment of a “very common squabble” between a neighbouring couple about (of all things) the weather, which culminates in the blunt put-down “stupid pig snout”.

But my abiding memory of this fine production, which is produced by About Turn Theatre Company’s founding artistic director Dan Hyde is the final scene in which Anne Frank looks up to the heavens and prays for those who feel sad or lonely to “hold to courage” and keep their faith, hopes and dreams. Because truth like love will out. Anne died at the hands of the Nazis. But her memory and her message lives on. And her dream of having a personal journal or novel published after the war to let the world know “how we were forced to live” was fulfilled and will continue to serve as a lesson for generations to come. Lest we forget.

Video by About Turn Theatre

Peter Callaghan
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