The Lives of Others – Keira Knightley dazzles in ‘sleek and riveting drama’

Keira Knightley is the “marquee name” in this much anticipated stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning film about a Stasi officer conducting a covert audio surveillance operation in East Berlin in the 1980s, said Nick Curtis in The Standard.

She takes the role of the spied-upon star actress Christa-Maria Sieland – who is “all professional sheen and charm until a devastating scene that Knightley performs with wrenching conviction”. But it would be wrong to characterise Robert Icke’s production as a star vehicle; in fact, it is an ensemble piece that features first-rate performances across the board, and superb lighting, design and music too.

“Ready to listen? Ready to be an audience?” asks Stasi operative Gerd Wiesler (superbly played by Stephen Dillane) at the start, while the house lights are still up, making us “queasily complicit” in his work, said Marianka Swain on London Theatre. He’s been ordered to listen in on conversations between Sieland and her playwright boyfriend (Luke Thompson of “Bridgerton”), and their artistic friends. An ideological communist, Wiesler believes he is doing vital work to protect the state from subversion but then he discovers his boss has ordered this operation not for political reasons, but for vile personal ones. As in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film, his growing disillusionment with the system, and his own cold existence, make for a “sleek and riveting” drama.

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The staging consists of a “series of beautifully designed prisons; spaces that trap, stifle and ultimately destroy the people who live in them”, said Alice Saville in The Independent. Sliding screens quickly close, leaving the audience with a tiny cinematic close-up.

Yet at times, said Clive Davis in The Times, it felt as if the characters were “hemmed in” less by the police state than “by a brooding, all-powerful force known as Robert Icke”. The auteur “imposes his aesthetic on every aspect of the evening”; in the end, you’re left “admiring the bravura flourishes rather than being drawn into the story itself”.
Adelphi Theatre, London; until 9 January.