‘The Lives of Others’ Theater Review: Keira Knightley Shines in Stage Version of Oscar-Winning Cold War Drama

It’s not surprising that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s acclaimed 2006 drama, The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for best international film, should resonate so strongly today, as AI makes state surveillance an ever more sophisticated and terrifying fact of life. Anyone coming away from the Gaza documentary Naza, for example, does so with a troubled glance at their smart phone.

And who better to adapt the film for the stage than Robert Icke, who made his name with his and Duncan Macmillan’s groundbreaking take on George Orwell’s 1984 and drew acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic with his contemporary version of Oedipus, starring Mark Strong and Tony winner Lesley Manville. Von Donnersmarck set The Lives of Others in the same year that Orwell’s prescient fiction takes place, so this production seems like a match made in dystopian heaven.

Icke’s adaptation sticks closely to von Donnersmarck’s original screenplay. It’s East Berlin, the Cold War. Stasi official Gerd Wiesler (Stephen Dillane), a gray-spirited devotee of the Communist regime, is given a new target: the dramatist Georg Dreyman (Luke Thompson). As “a non-subversive playwright they actually read in the West,” Dreyman seems an unlikely source of suspicion. But the order has been given by Wiesler’s slimy, careerist boss Grubitz (Paul Higgins) at the behest of Hempf (Andrew Woodall), a party minister. Hempf’s motivation isn’t ideology but lust — he simply wants the writer out of the way to ease his pursuit of Dreyman’s actress-lover, Christa-Maria Sieland (Keira Knightley).

And so Wiesler sends his team into Dreyman’s apartment, bugging every nook and cranny they can find, while Wiesler himself sets up shop in the attic with headphones and a typewriter, listening in.

Icke uses his formidable talent for imaginative, dynamic, multimedia staging to manifest the act of surveillance — inherently secretive, out of sight — into something extremely tangible. He’s aided hugely in this by designer Hildegard Bechtler’s remarkable set. Dreyman’s apartment is a huge, three-dimensional, fully furnished creation, on a constant and pacy revolve. Often a mobile stage offers merely a changing view of static actors, but this one enables the audience to follow multiple characters as they move through the apartment, in and out of rooms, with action often happening in different spaces at once.

The benefit is in evidence almost immediately at a packed artsy house party — which for the Stasi represents “prime hunting ground for subversion… with people who can’t keep quiet” — where the gate-crashing Wiesler gets his first, close-up glimpse of his prey; then again as the wiretappers swarm over the same now-empty space.

The apartment will occasionally deconstruct, its walls pulled apart to make way for a bar, or Wiesler’s own drab home — some of the set segues almost defying logic. The walls also act as a screen for video designer Tal Yarden’s Big Brotherish black and white images, notably offering close-ups of interrogations taking place live upstage.

To the side is Wiesler’s small table, which he shares with a subordinate who takes the night shift. While this represents the attic, the show’s strongest conceit involves Dillane walking unseen among the other characters, at one point even sitting on the sofa between them. This suggests both the intense focus of Wiesler’s eavesdropping and its insidious intrusion. This presence takes on a metaphorical weight, too, as the snoop becomes something of a guardian angel for the unsuspecting people downstairs.

Just as in the film, the speed with which Wiesler starts to sympathize with the couple can feel like a stretch, a romanticized wish-fulfillment. That said, this fits with the dogged optimism in humanity that fuels the material. Von Donnersmarck has provided plenty of reasons for the spy’s compassion, particularly the effect on Dreyman of his blacklisted director and mentor’s suicide, and Christa-Maria’s heartrending inability — such is the state’s willingness to destroy lives and livelihoods — to refuse the venal minister’s sexual attentions.

Wiesler’s change of heart leads the piece into more conventional thriller territory as Dreyman is driven to actually attempt something subversive. Wiesler schemes to keep him out of trouble, but Grubitz takes charge and closes in. While the film handled this transition superbly, the play fares less well, and ironically, the technical virtuosity is partly to blame. Once so dazzling, the constant revolution of the stage, the mechanically slick choreography of actors around it, the sheer repetitiveness of it all — heightened by composer Max Richter’s overly insistent score of strident strings, bells and whistles — now slowly combine to dampen the tension, not heighten it.

And while engaging so well with the mechanics of state repression, Icke and his team have lost some of the weary bleakness of the period, not least by limiting Wiesler’s solitary life outside of his work. The use of Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” and Mama Cass’ “Make Your Own Kind of Music” are attention-grabbing but, for a piece about listening, there could have been a little more silence.

In a return to the stage after 11 years (her last appearance was as the title character in Thérèse Raquin on Broadway), Knightley demonstrates just what an accomplished, ever more confident actress she’s become in that time. While Christa-Maria was effectively a supporting character in the film, she is center stage here — from being the vibrant party hostess who captivates her guests with an impromptu performance, to the desperate victim of the minister’s attentions (his sexual assault is extremely difficult to watch, not least because of Knightley’s performance) and of Wiesler’s albeit reluctant interrogation. Not surprisingly, when Christa-Maria’s tribulations are captured on the video screen, Knightley’s close-ups are sensational.

Dillane, a master of pained introversion, probably would have killed for a close-up. Instead, he’s restricted too often to skulking about in his headphones, reacting to those around him, lost at times amid the showy staging. But the actor is perfectly cast, icily conveying Wiesler’s dry, driven nature and the awkwardness with which he carries his newfound benevolence. And it’s usually Dillane who offers the play’s shards of humor. “I’m nobody,” he says believably when the unsuspecting Christa-Maria welcomes him at the party. “Who told you that?” she asks. “My mother.”

Around this pair, the acting can be indifferent. As Jerska, the blacklisted director, Nick Holder strikes the wrong note, offering an ugly, ruffian personality that denies any sympathy for the man. Higgins riffs amusingly on his obsequious toad from Slow Horses, but lacks the steely calculation behind the easy smile. And though Thompson is efficient and likable enough, his Dreyman doesn’t really register. The sweet-natured idealist can be a thankless role to play, but this performance underlines how effortlessly charming and affecting Sebastian Koch was in the film, the pathos he created sorely lacking here.

Venue: Adelphi Theatre, London
Cast: Keira Knightley, Stephen Dillane, Luke Thompson, Calum Finlay, Paul Higgins, Leda Hodgson, Nick Holder, Irfan Shamji, Adrian Woodall
Playwright: Robert Icke, adapted from the film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Director: Robert Icke
Set and costume designer: Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting designer: Jon Clark
Music: Max Richter
Sound designer and additional music: Giles Thomas
Video designer: Tal Yarden
Presented by Sonia Friedman Productions