Review of BBC1's The Diary of Anne Frank

New Series Dares to Show the Stubborn, Sarcastic Teenager in Anne

Jan 9, 2009

Ellie Kendrick puts in a compelling performance, capturing Anne's rebelliousness as well as her humour and sensitivity.

Self-centred, lacking in empathy, impatient, with a sharp tongue and plenty of attitude – a typical teenager, as anyone in close proximity to one lately has probably noticed.

Ellie Kendrick as Anne Frank

Anne’s problem, as this moving dramatisation shows, was that going through puberty and being full of dreams is not the best time to be imprisoned with a bunch of fuddy-duddy adults and your swot of a sister.

The schoolgirl’s voice comes through clearly in her diaries, and in writer Deborah Moggach’s sensitive adaptation, and it is easy to recognise her day-to-day frustrations and laugh at her exasperation with the grown-ups. What is more of a stretch for today’s audience, of course, is understanding the dread of the murderous Nazis out in the Amsterdam streets and the Allied bombers overhead.

Eighteen-year-old Ellie Kendrick, with just four roles behind her in dramas such as Lewis and Prime Suspect 7, was 17 when she filmed her role as 13-year-old Anne. She is petite enough and close enough in looks for the part, but her natural ease and charm in the role has captured Anne’s sparkiness and wit and brought the show to life.

Felicity Jones as Margot

Anne is a blunt contrast to her quiet 16-year-old sister, Margot (played by Felicity Jones), being far more bolshy, demanding and funny. In each of the first four episodes, Kendrick has raised a laugh when voicing her character’s spluttering outrage at one of her fellow fugitive’s shortcomings.

‘Of all the boys around we have to end up with him,’ she moans to Margot about bashful Peter (Geoff Breton), son of the Van Daan’s, who join the Franks in the secret annexe. Her disappointment with Peter doesn’t stop her stealing him from her sister later on for her first romance.

Then there is her hilarious incomprehension of the roommate she is forced to share with in the crowded hideaway, the middle-aged, sad dentist, Albert Dussel (a doleful Nicholas Farrell). ‘He’s sulking!’ Anne whispers, dumbfounded and oblivious to his misery.

Moggach has said she didn’t want to portray Anne as an icon sainted by history. Instead, she has offered a portrait that is truthful and compelling.

Tamsin Greig and Lesley Sharp

The boredom, the little indignities of the two Jewish families and a bachelor crammed together in hiding for two years, the pettiness – it’s all here. Lesley Sharp is unforgettable as the embarrassing Mrs Van Daan. Tamsin Greig, as the reticent mother who has a painful relationship with daddy’s girl Anne, is a revelation after her comedy outings in Green Wing and Shaun of the Dead.

It has been a pleasure to get to know these ordinary people trying to preserve some normality and hope for the future in a world turned grotesque and savage.

Watching the last episode, when the SS officer finally finds them, is sure to be painful viewing.

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