A Small Light review: Anne Frank’s story is intimate and epic at the same time

Anne perished, aged 14, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The posthumously published book The Diary of a Young Girl, assembled from Anne’s daily entries by her father Otto, who was the only member of the Frank family to survive the concentration camps, became a global bestseller in 1947.

It’s never been out of print and remains an invaluable first-hand historical document of the darkest chapter in human history.

Anne’s story has been told multiple times in other forms — stage plays, films, TV dramas, documentaries and even a graphic novel — keeping it alive for generation after generation.

The eight-part Disney-National Geographic miniseries A Small Light (Disney+) is not another straightforward retelling, however. Anne features in it, played engagingly and without too much precocity by Billie Boullet, but she’s by no means the primary focus.

This is the story of Miep Gies, the young woman who, with the help of a few other extraordinarily courageous Dutch citizens, was instrumental in hiding and protecting the Frank family.

Making such a famous historical figure as Anne Frank effectively a supporting character in her own story could easily have gone horribly wrong.

But in the hands of husband-and-wife writing and producing team Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, the drama is a compelling triumph.

The shining light of A Small Light is English actress Bel Powley, who’s simply astonishing as Miep. She’s given terrific support by Joe Cole — who made the right decision when he quit his increasingly thankless role in Peaky Blinders — as her charming, bookish husband Jan, whose idea of a little light reading over a few beers is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Also superb is Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank, a man who saw the fascist darkness descending before many German Jews did and fled to the Netherlands with his family as soon as Adolf Hitler came to power. In fact, the entire cast, which includes Noah Taylor as Jewish dentist and friend of the Frank family Dr Pfeffer, is outstanding.

The first episode (two are available now with the rest following weekly) opens, in gut-twistingly tense fashion, in 1942, as Miep escorts the terrified Margot (Ashley Brooke) through a Nazi checkpoint to (relative) safety.

Then it reels back nine years. The Amsterdam of 1933 is a bright, breezy, carefree city full of life and vigour. Uppermost in Miep’s mind is drinking, dancing and romancing.

Like many other Dutch people, she’s naive enough to believe the country’s neutrality will protect it from Nazi invasion. This, after all, is what Queen Wilhelmina — who would flee to London after the Dutch surrender to Germany — had assured her subjects.

Miep’s serious-minded parents think she’s too much of a party girl for her own good. They suggest she should either find a job (they aren’t exactly plentiful) or marry her brother.

This is not as bizarre or grotesque as it sounds. Miep, who was born in Austria, is their adopted daughter, so they’d be breaking no law, biological or otherwise. Her parents might have thought differently if they’d known, as Miep did, their son was gay.

Despite having no skills or qualifications to speak of, she appeals to Otto, who’s won over by her charm and humour, to give her a job. He will later appeal to her to protect his family after his visa application to move to the USA is rejected.

As Miep becomes the Franks’ protector, taking more and more risks, A Small Light conveys the mounting sense of terror in chillingly routine ways, such as Miep being warned to be careful not to buy too many groceries in a single shop, in case it arouses the suspicion of a quisling shopkeeper who’ll happily betray anybody for Nazi money.

This is a riveting profile of incredible courage and humanity in the face of barbaric tyranny that manages to be intimate and epic at the same time.