The Lives of Others at Adelphi Theatre review: Keira Knightley's return to the stage is revolutionary

Keira Knightley makes a striking return to the London stage in Robert Icke’s magnificent adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning 2006 German film about the GDR’s surveillance state in the 1980s. As the marquee name she is fittingly cast as Christa-Marie Sieland, the bright, brittle star of the East Berlin theatre scene - all professional sheen and charm until a devastating scene that Knightley performs with wrenching conviction.

This is not a celebrity vehicle, though, but an ensemble piece. Indeed, you could almost call it a gesamtkunstwerk - a “total artwork” - so vital are design, sound and music to Icke’s vision. Christa lives with playwright Georg Dreyman (Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson, heroically fleshing out a role somewhat lacking in colour), whose faith in the socialist utopia is frayed by the blacklisting and suicide of a comrade.

Both are spied upon by Gerd Wiesler (outstanding Stephen Dillane), a weary true believer slowly realising that his masters have feet of clay, and seduced by the transforming power of art.

Headphones on, he ambles monkishly through Hildegard Bechtler’s revolving, bifurcating apartment set, with its gauze panels showing grainy, magnified spycam and interrogation footage – a metaphor for the ease with which the state intruded on its subjects’ lives. A vast cast of supernumeraries suggest how authoritarian collectivism crushes individuals.

Keira Knightley (Christa-Maria Sieland)

Manuel Harlan

There is great force here in the dynamics of individual relationships. Knightley’s Christa may be flighty and somewhat unstable – we see her squirreling pills from the bathroom cabinet. But it is the solid, decent Georg who suffers a lack of imagination and empathy when the attentions of the malign government minister Hempf (Andrew Woodall, chilling) light upon her.

Wiesler is portrayed as the interrogator’s interrogator, wringing confessions from suspects over gruelling 40-hour grillings, and with a nose for sedition. Yet he is outmanoeuvred by the younger, less diligent but more politically acute Grubitz (Paul Higgins, alternating between anxious fury and arch asides about how much he hates theatre).

Knightley, Thompson and Higgins are excellent, and there is sterling supporting work from Calum Finlay, Irfan Shamji and Nick Holder. But it’s impossible to take your eyes off Dillane, with his grey demeanour, exhausted flyaway hair and small, fussy gestures. His comic timing when he pecks out dialogue for a play about Lenin and his mother, instead of filing an accurate report, is impeccable.

Luke Thompson (Georg Dreyman)

Photo by Manuel Harlan

Icke stunningly and elegantly opens up the closed worlds of the observer and the observed depicted in the film. The rich texture and the command of ominous mood here is emblematic of his skill. So too is the use of slightly outdated Western music (70s Bowie, Cass Elliot), giving glimmers of hedonistic joy in the drab East.

Even the metatheatricality here – the visible stagehands hauling the set around, the message that even Stasi officers are playing a role – is entirely earned. German theatre is famously a top-down affair driven by visionaries. So Icke and his cast may have smirked at Dreyman’s line: “The play’s just a recipe: the director’s the chef.”

This five-star review comes with a quibble: the insistence on theatre as a humanising and a revolutionary force verges on the irksome. I don’t deny artists played their part in the gradual erosion of the GDR (which I visited while working in West Berlin aged 18 in 1984, the year the play is set). Late on, footage shows crowds hacking down the Berlin Wall in 1989, and I’m pretty sure not all of them were writers and actors.

Like I say, a minor objection. It’s great to have Knightley back on the London stage after 15 years, alongside Dillane and Thompson in a fine, big cast. Icke, best known for his radical Shakespeares and startlingly reworked classics, here brilliantly re-examines the recent past at a time when we’re arguably more surveilled, monitored, and eavesdropped-upon than ever.