Keira Knightley and Stephen Dillane have earned critical praise for the first night of The Lives of Others at the Adelphi Theatre in London.
In his first-night review, critic Patrick Marmion called the pairing of Knightley and the Game of Thrones actor "something extra special" in British director Robert Icke's stage adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-winning 2006 film about East Germany's Stasi secret police.
The West End run marks rare UK stage work for the Pirates of the Caribbean actress, who has appeared on the British stage just once since making her London theatre debut in Moliere's The Misanthrope in 2009. At the curtain call, Dillane, Knightley and co-star Luke Thompson bowed together before the Adelphi Theatre audience.
Plot of The Lives of Others stage adaptation
Set in the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s at the tail end of communist rule, the play stars Knightley as Christa, an actress who forms half of an apparently ideal power couple with her lover, the playwright Georg, played by Bridgerton actor Luke Thompson. Georg enjoys the favour and protection of ruling communist party officials.
Behind that facade, Christa is trapped in a coercive relationship with the minister of culture, Hempf, played by Andrew Woodall. Dillane plays Stasi Captain Gerd, who launches a covert surveillance operation on the couple to investigate suspected anti-state activities and unexpectedly uncovers Hempf's abuse and sexual blackmail of Christa.
As Gerd reluctantly listens in on the culture minister's abuse over his wiretaps, the ordeal undermines the officer's belief in the cradle-to-grave assurances of life under East German communism, making his moral shift the pivot of the drama.
Keira Knightley and Stephen Dillane performances
Marmion wrote that "far from just a pretty face, Ms Knightley puts herself on the line" in the role of Christa. Appearing at first as a "beautiful enigma", she speaks in playful Shakespearean riddles through Icke's witty English translation while struggling beneath the surface to protect herself and Georg as she is pushed toward a psychological breaking point.
While Christa is distressed and compromised by her secret, Dillane's Gerd becomes equally compromised by his own covert operation. He begins the play as a proud, "bloodless official whose every movement is slow and considered", before turning in a touching and unexpected scene where he is "moved to tears by Georg playing piano for Christa" as the reality of his own loneliness dawns on him.
That shift leads into a melancholy scene in which Gerd meets Christa seemingly by chance inside an empty cafe. Meanwhile, Thompson's Georg remains tragically oblivious, holding only partial knowledge of what is happening to his partner. Marmion noted that the desk-bound playwright proves "unusually ripped in his intimate encounters with her", details that an embarrassed Gerd glosses over when reporting to his agitated Stasi boss, Grubitz, played by Paul Higgins.
Robert Icke production design and soundtrack
Icke, an Olivier Award-winning British director renowned for contemporary stage adaptations such as Oresteia and 1984, embeds the story in what Marmion described as a "slick, high-tech production steeped in the soul-eating practicalities of surveillance." Staged primarily in and around Georg's East German high-rise flat, the set uses ghostly lighting that makes the walls between rooms look alternately solid and transparent.
The production's ambient sound design draws partly on the clicking noises heard on telephone taps. It is paired with period music by Brian Eno and David Bowie, whose late-1970s Berlin collaborations captured the divided Cold War city, alongside uneasy musical interludes composed by contemporary classical minimalist Max Richter.
Background on the Oscar-winning Stasi drama
The play adapts Henckel von Donnersmarck's acclaimed 2006 German-language drama Das Leben der Anderen, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Its story examines the Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, which operated as one of the Cold War's most pervasive intelligence and secret police agencies until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of East German communist rule.
Knightley earned Academy Award nominations on screen for Pride and Prejudice and The Imitation Game, while Dillane is widely known as Stannis Baratheon in HBO's Game of Thrones and won a Tony Award for Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Thompson stars as Benedict Bridgerton in the Netflix period drama Bridgerton, and Higgins is known for the political satire The Thick of It.
Marmion wrote that his "only beef is the want of originality in adapting a film for the stage", asking where new plays are that examine modern modes of conformity in the way this story examines the German Democratic Republic. Even so, he concluded that the high acting and production standards make the show easy to forgive, with tickets still remaining on sale at the Adelphi Theatre.
