Keira Knightley Returns to the West End in Stasi Spy Play The Lives of Others

Keira Knightley returns to the West End in The Lives of Others, a new stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning 2006 film, directed by Robert Icke at the Adelphi Theatre.

The play is set in East Berlin in 1984. Knightley plays Christa-Maria, a theatre actor in a relationship with a director, Georg, played by Luke Thompson. Stephen Dillane takes the role of Wiesler, the Stasi officer whose principles are gradually challenged and weakened by his round-the-clock exposure to the couple.

Speaking to the Guardian ahead of the production, Knightley described her own experience of surveillance. "I knew I was being followed," she said, recalling a hacking ordeal that, she told the paper, left her acutely aware of what it means to be watched — the paranoia at the heart of both the film and the play.

What separates the spies from the spied-upon?

The characters in The Lives of Others divide cleanly between watchers and watched, Knightley and Thompson told the Guardian in a joint interview conducted over what the paper wryly noted was "assorted tubs of carrot sticks and salad." "I just realised I've got very crunchy food," Knightley said — an apology for the risk her lunch posed to the recording, in a conversation otherwise devoted to listening in.

Wiesler's arc drives the drama. Dillane's Stasi officer begins as an instrument of the East German state and ends up changed by sustained, intimate exposure to a cultured couple whose private life he monitors around the clock.

What else did the actors raise?

Beyond surveillance, the interview touched on two practical grievances:

• The cost of theatre tickets today, which both actors flagged as a barrier for audiences
• Fury at ringtones going off in the stalls during live performances

Both concerns sit close to the production's themes. A play about the intrusion of unwanted noise into private life now opens in a West End contending, by the actors' own account, with prices that exclude spectators and phones that interrupt them.

Why this adaptation matters now

The source film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and became one of the most widely seen German films of its era. Icke, one of British theatre's most in-demand directors, transposes its study of state surveillance and personal betrayal to the stage with a cast led by Knightley, Thompson and Dillane.

For Knightley, the role continues her run of West End work and pairs a period story of the Stasi with a very contemporary anxiety. Her own hacking nightmare, disclosed in the Guardian interview, gives the production's questions about watching and being watched a present-day edge.

The takeaway: a 1984-set story about surveillance arrives in London with a star who says she has lived a version of its fear.