‘I am going to be a famous writer, singer and dancer one day,” announces precocious teenager Anne Frank as she batters her irrepressible energy against the unyielding walls of the hideaway protecting her family from the fanatics out to kill them. Singer and dancer she would never be. Anne’s fame — destined to endure as long as words are read — is as a writer who exposed the infamy of a regime that stole her life before it had properly begun and the lives of six million other Jews.

For more than two years, in the sanctuary-cum-prison behind her father’s offices in Amsterdam, she recorded the privations endured there by herself and its other seven occupants. In The Diary of Anne Frank — an instant classic on its post-war publication — she wrote as well of the yearnings and ambitions of a girl all too typical, we must think, of so many slaughtered by the Nazis.

Her appealing — if at times somewhat exhausting — character is perfectly caught by Amy Dawson in the stage version of Anne’s work brought to the Playhouse by Touring Consortium Theatre Company. Properly, other occupants of ‘the annexe’ are presented in Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s script (adapted by Wendy Kesselman) as reflections of her outsize personality. Thus we see the decency and sound sense of her good-natured dad (Christopher Timothy), with whom she enjoyed a warm relationship and the somewhat chippier nature of mum (Kerry Peers) with whom she did not. Older sister Margot (Victoria Ross) remains the slight enigma that such siblings will ever be to their juniors.

Her burgeoning love for the buttoned-up, slightly older Peter van Daan (Robert Galas) is well drawn, as is the slight vulgarity of his mother (Sarah Ingram) and the gluttony — were this word anywhere appropriate in a place so desperately short of food — of his father (Steven Pinder).

The recriminations, rows and occasional delightful acts of kindness in this claustrophobic environment are perfectly caught. So, too, is the bravery and decency of the non-Jewish friends outside (Sally Oliver and Andrew Westfield) risking much to succour them there.

Wailing sirens and barking dogs, meanwhile, suggest the menace beyond the walls, which is given physical presence within them during the closing scenes of the play — in a felicitous touch by director Nikolai Foster — of the German security policeman (Philip Marriott) who will eventually burst in to round up the annexe’s occupants.

Until Saturday. Box office: 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).