Anne Frank's story has been portrayed many times on stage, notably in a version by Bernard Kops, and the Pulitzer prize-winning adaptation of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett on which the present production is based. None of these, however, takes into account the previously suppressed material that appeared in Mirjam Pressler's definitive edition three years ago, which did much to rescue saintly, sexless Anne from being occluded by her own cult.
In excising the more intimate passages of his daughter's diary, Otto Frank inadvertently preserved an image of a girl who seemed too old for her years and yet strangely too young for them at the same time. Wendy Kesselman's dramatic update presents the unresolved Anne in the middle - the flighty teenager who begins her secret life pinning matinee idols to the wall - and concludes it with an adult exploration of her emerging feelings for her slightly older fellow-captive, Peter.
This is the edition that had hardened, Broadway hacks drawing heart-broken conclusions; and Jonathan Church's impeccably sensitive production looks set to do the same. To a certain extent these are true events too coruscating for the theatre - a fact which seems to be acknowledged in the way the actors simply disappear after the final scene and, like their characters, never come back. A dignified gesture, which by no means suggests that the cast do not warrant their applause.
The ensemble playing is superb: one never loses the sense that there are eight individual stories being told through the lucid scrutiny of an adolescent girl. Yet the entire weight of the drama rests, as it must, on the slender shoulders of 16-year-old Anne Bedi - not only a disturbingly accurate physical match for Anne with her rosebud mouth and huge, liquid eyes, but also a young actor of sufficient re sources to suggest the incompatible extremes of Anne's personality. Despite the icon Anne Frank has become, Bedi is not afraid to show how, for the inhabitants of the annexe, she was often nothing more than an infernal nuisance.
It is extraordinary to witness how she develops from a pain in the neck to a throb in the heart.
Until Saturday (box office: 0114 249 6000) then touring.
