Right now seems as good a time as any to revisit this venerable, still affecting adaptation of Anne Frank’s wartime diaries. Done well, it can open a window onto empathy and understanding.

This production, staged in a large and wholly unsympathetic venue, struggles to find the play’s heartbeat.

Penned by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and premiered in the United States just a decade after Anne Frank’s death in the Buchenwald concentration camp, it offers a softened, distinctly Americanised portrait of a teenage girl. The script draws on edited diaries from which Anne’s father, Otto, removed material he considered inappropriate or unflattering from his her record of two years spent hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex of an Amsterdam factory.

Tonally, the work feels closer to Anne of Green Gables than Anne of wartime Europe. Anne’s saintly optimism and coy rebellion feels more in tune with the anxieties of  teen-quake America in the 1950s than life under occupation. Its portrait of a coming-of-age forged in circumstances beyond imagining – in stifling proximity to adults – can be affecting, however, especially for younger audiences.

The Dairy of Anne Frank. Photo © Amanda Humphreys

Directed by Drew Antony (also the producer), this staging has clearly worked elsewhere, collecting awards for its Heath Ledger Theatre debut in Perth last year. Here, though, in a vast and ornate movie palace, it flatlines, barely raising a pulse across two hours, even at the climax.

In part, it’s a venue problem. Even from row D, the stage feels detached from the auditorium; from the back stalls it must seem remote. The cast is miked, but with sound pushed through rock band-sized PA stacks at the side of the stage, vocal subtleties are compressed, cross-talk muddies and moments of high emotion in the second act acquire a blaring edge.

Led by Chloe-Jean Vincent as a peppy Anne, the ensemble’s performances are solid – Jamie Jewell’s prissy dentist, Jan Dussel, is a standout – but with overly uniform pacing and a climax that fails to land, the production too often resembles an animated waxwork.

The Diary of Anne Frank plays at the State Theatre, Sydney until 2 April.