Keira Knightley Stars in Robert Icke's The Lives of Others: A Review

Keira Knightley makes her latest West End appearance in The Lives of Others, Robert Icke's stage adaptation of the 2006 Oscar-winning German film about Stasi surveillance and the suppression of art in the former GDR. The production trades the film's subtlety for melodrama, and the results are mixed.

The source material is formidable. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film follows a Stasi officer who secretly changes sides while spying on a writer and his girlfriend. Much of its power, the original review notes, lay in "a maelstrom of emotion rumbling beneath a taut surface" and in the understated performance of the late Ulrich Mühe, who played Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler and was himself a former East German with a personal Stasi backstory.

What works on stage?

Icke has a proven record of fast-moving adaptations of canonical material, from the Greeks in Oedipus and Oresteia to Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, reimagined as The Doctor. Here he makes a good structural decision: the drama is centralised so much of it unfolds in Dreyman's apartment.

The production excels above all in stagecraft. Suspense builds through thudding sound, lighting and a whirl of movement. The face of the stage sometimes becomes a camera shutter, expanding and contracting threateningly. Hildegard Bechtler's set design transforms from interrogation room to the couple's revolving home, with diaphanous screens that leave all secret activity exposed.

What does the casting deliver?

Luke Thompson plays writer George Dreyman and seems too puppyish in the role. Knightley plays his girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, a stage actor and the object of jealous lust for venal government minister Hempf (Andrew Woodall), who seeks to destroy Dreyman so he can claim her.

Knightley gives a committed performance, but the character feels overheated and underwritten. She wears glamorous dresses with cinched waists and coiffed hair, looking like a woman from wartime Berlin rather than 1980s East Germany. Her quotations from Romeo and Juliet hang oddly: this couple are not star-crossed teenagers but grownups carrying their own secrets.

Does Wiesler's transformation convince?

Wiesler, played by Dillane, sits listening to the couple's secrets after their apartment has been bugged, and weaves physically between them — a theatrical way of showing the intimacy and intrusion of his surveillance. But where the film delivered Wiesler's interiority through lingering closeups, the stage has fewer ways to open his inner world.

His inner change is portrayed "too subtly and not subtly enough." He lies curled and sobbing when he hears Dreyman playing the piano after news that his artist friend has hanged himself. The sobbing suggests a new appreciation of the arts, but it does not feel enough for his dramatic shift. Paul Higgins plays his boss Grubitz, "who really is grubby."

The review also flags plot lapses that lack Icke's signature meticulousness: would Hempf assault Christa-Maria in a place he has instructed the Stasi to monitor? Would Dreyman shout about betrayal in front of the officers who just found the smuggled typewriter? And David Bowie's Sound and Vision playing in a cafe seems implausible in the GDR, where western music was publicly banned.

A penultimate scene — a TV interview in which Dreyman explains the entire story, twist and all — is "a coda we shouldn't need."

Why does the story matter now?

"Writers are engineers of the soul," Hempf says, borrowing Stalin's phrase about the power, and therefore the danger, of art. The reviewer points to contemporary parallels: Sally Rooney's treatment in the UK, and the Home Office's ban on the pro-Palestinian Swedish author Andreas Malm from entering the country. The story's underlying anxiety about the political will to control and diminish art should hit home — sadly, this production doesn't make it land.

Enough adaptations have shown that films can become their own thing on stage, and some viewers may find the suspense enough to justify this one. But the review's verdict is clear: Icke's The Lives of Others does not manage the immensely difficult task it sets itself, and the question of whether prestige screen-to-stage transfers can hold the film's quiet power remains open.