Saintly skew on a true story

WAS Otto Frank really such a saintly character?

I do sometimes wonder when watching productions of Frances Goodrich and her husband Albert Hackett’s play, based on Frank’s famous daughter’s diary of two years in hiding.

Throughout the entire time the Franks and their daughters Anne and Margot; the Van Daans and son Peter, and friend Mr Dussel live in four cramped rooms in an attic in Amsterdam, Otto Frank never raises his voice and is forever reasonable.

The stage play skews all the characters this way — Goodrich and Hackett were after all two of the writers of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — making a sentimental tragedy out of something heavy with injustice.

The careful craftsmanship of the writers turns what could be a dull day-by-day recounting of boring events into one of small-scale highs and lows.

This Lyceum Players’ second production (the last in the early Eighties), this time from director Ean Burgon, drives an occasionally bland middle course though light and sombre, and is enlivened by a terrific central relationship between real-life husband, wife and daughter John and Jo Weetman and their daughter Grace.

If John’s Mr Frank is a little more saintly than usual, Jo Weetman offers a natural portrait of a woman trying to keep things together, while youthful Grace has the childish exuberance of a girl of 13 allied to a growing maturity as the evening advances.

This being a real family, they play with real tensions — it is telling that Sophia McLean as elder daughter Margot has trouble looking like one of them.

Lisa Butterworth is strong as the superficial Mrs Van Daan; Roger Hartman rather bluff and selfish as the husband, and Edmund Taylor likeable as quietly geeky son Peter.

Jon Comyn-Platt remains resolutely set in his ways as middle-aged Dussel, while John Fletcher and Sue Wharfe offer able support as contact with the outside world.

But if the evening seems a little too cosy and the war a little too distant at times, it is pretty much as the writers believed they had to make it.