The Diary of Anne Frank: staging the Secret Annex and designs for an adolescent interior

Abstract

This article focuses on the designs for and staging of the play The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), and considers the ways in which the sets of the Secret Annex both documented and transformed the hiding place to convey its isolation and confinement to the audience. It also explores how the decoration and furnishings of Anne’s recreated bedroom reflected broader postwar-era cultural messages about coming of age, adolescent girls, and their material surroundings during that period. Published in English in 1952, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl chronicled the more than two years that Anne, her family, and four other Jews spent in hiding during World War II in an annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The success of the English-language book led to a theatrical adaptation by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Directed by Garson Kanin and with sets by Boris Aronson, the play opened on Broadway in 1955. Rooted in documentary-like details and based in large part upon a real space, the sets for The Diary of Anne Frank nevertheless reflect aesthetic choices firmly situated in postwar US discourse.