Keira Knightley returns to the West End in Robert Icke's Stasi drama The Lives of Others

A Stasi thriller on the London stage

Robert Icke has adapted Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-winning 2006 German film for the stage, and the production is staged at the Adelphi Theatre in London. The story is set in East Berlin in 1984 and follows Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi officer played by Stephen Dillane, who is assigned to watch the playwright Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. Luke Thompson plays Dreyman, and Keira Knightley plays Sieland, her first West End appearance in 15 years. Paul Higgins plays Grubitz, Wiesler's ambitious new boss, while Andrew Woodall plays the minister Hempf, a government figure who wants to destroy Dreyman so he can claim Sieland.

Staging and design

The production relies heavily on its design, with a series of elegantly built rooms that trap and wear down the people inside them. In one scene the modernist flat revolves slowly while black-gloved state officials fit microphones and wires, and the Independent compares their choreographed movement to carousel horses. Wiesler sits at one side of the stage and switches between headphones covering different rooms of the apartment, so he catches every sob and scream from the couple. The Guardian argues that the film's subtlety, built on closeups and inference, becomes a more overt melodrama on stage, and that Wiesler's inner life is harder to show when the story relies on the same surveillance.

Critical reception

The reviews are mixed. The Independent calls the production a must-see, and the New Statesman calls it a triumph that redefines what it means to be watched. The Evening Standard describes Knightley's return as striking and calls Icke's adaptation magnificent. The Guardian is less impressed, saying the show has plenty of suspenseful stagecraft but struggles to match the subtlety of the film, and it finds Thompson too puppyish in the role of Dreyman. The Guardian's reviewer also notes that the staging turns the couple's secrets into a set of grown-up problems rather than a romance of star-crossed lovers.

Performances

Knightley's Sieland attracts most of the attention. The Independent says her brooding sulkiness suits a conflicted performer for whom life only feels real when she is acting. The Guardian says she gives a committed performance, but that the character feels overheated and underwritten, and that her glamorous dresses and lines from Romeo and Juliet hang oddly over the story. The Evening Standard describes Sieland as the bright, brittle star of the East Berlin theatre scene. Dillane's Wiesler earns praise for a form of listening that the Independent describes as almost spiritual, with the actor sinking to the floor and keeping Sieland's secrets from his colleagues as if they were confessions heard in church.

The source film

The Guardian notes that the 2006 film depicts Stasi surveillance and the suppression of art in the former GDR. In the film, Wiesler was played by Ulrich Muhe, a former East German whose own backstory involved the Stasi. Icke's stage version keeps the central story of a Stasi officer who secretly changes sides while spying on a writer and his partner, but it presents that change through open theatrical devices rather than the film's quiet close-ups.