'The Lives of Others' review — Keira Knightley, Luke Thompson and Stephen Dillane are riveting in this queasy surveillance drama

Read our review of The Lives of Others, adapted and directed by Robert Icke, now in performances at the Adelphi Theatre to 9 January 2027.

Summary

• The Lives of Others premieres at the Adelphi Theatre
• Robert Icke adapts and directs this East Berlin-set tale of love, art and surveillance
• Keira Knightley makes a strong return to stage, playing a celebrated actress
• Stephen Dillane and Luke Thompson are also excellent in this riveting production

The voyeuristic aspect of theatre is put to potent use in The Lives of Others, Robert Icke’s sleek and riveting adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 Oscar-winning film. “Ready to listen? Ready to be an audience?” queries Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler before he makes us queasily complicit in the secret police’s intrusive monitoring of citizens in 1984 East Berlin.

It is clever (if occasionally overstated) paralleling, particularly as the piece explores how watching, listening and engaging with someone else’s life – whether through spying or consuming a vivid piece of art – can emotionally affect us. In this case, it’s the dogged, by-the-book Wiesler who finds himself unexpectedly changed by his surveillance subjects: playwright Georg Dreyman and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland.

Wiesler is meant to be reporting on them to his superior, Grubitz, but becomes disillusioned when he realises that the operation is really an excuse for culture minister Hempf to get his rival, Dreyman, out of the way so he can claim Sieland; he already has a vile coercive relationship with her.

But it’s more than that. Although Wiesler cautions an underling to remain objective, he becomes drawn into the couple’s passionate artistic world (here, the headphone-wearing Wiesler actually drifts into their apartment), which challenges his political convictions. Socialist leaders were alert to that possibility: Hempf quotes Stalin – “Poets are engineers of the soul” – while Dreyman tells a story about how Lenin had to stop listening to Beethoven’s stirring Appassionata because he needed to be able to smash people’s heads in, without mercy, to finish the revolution.

Stephen Dillane is remarkable as the lonely Wiesler, who begins by giving dry, bureaucratic reports (Dreyman and Sieland end one evening “having intercourse, presumably”), but, as he connects with them, he grows physically ravaged by this morally corrosive work. Yet he is also inspired: amusingly, he starts writing a play to cover up for Dreyman’s subversive activities, and he is brought to tears by the grieving writer playing the piano (a gorgeous original piece by Max Richter).

Keira Knightley, making her return to London theatre after a 15-year absence, is inspired casting for the glamorous star possessed of an otherworldly beauty. She’s excellent, too, as the insecure offstage Sieland, prepared to make certain compromises to ensure that her career – which she believes wholly defines her – can continue.

Knightley is well partnered by Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson as the easily charming Dreyman: initially neutral to a fault, but gradually driven to take a stand. Strong too are Paul Higgins as the slimy, careerist Grubitz and Andrew Woodall as the chilling, exploitative Hempf.

One of the biggest adaptation changes is that the action nearly all takes place within the apartment, ramping up the claustrophobia. Hildegard Bechtler’s monumental revolving design allows us (and the Stasi) to examine every inch of this space, with sparing use of video projection for private moments like Sieland popping pills or her sickening sexual assault – which, in a nightmarish touch, is drowned out by Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music”. Giles Thomas’s intense sound design also features eerie mic crackle when we’re listening in.

The Stasi had around 200,000 informers in East Germany, cultivating paranoia, fear and distrust: that is powerfully conveyed here. But there is resonance too with our modern-day technological surveillance, censorship, authoritarian regimes, parasocial relationships, and the necessity of art to foster original thought, resistance, and, perhaps most importantly, empathy. Icke’s production, in itself, makes a persuasive case for that vital contribution.

The Lives of Others is at the Adelphi Theatre to 9 January 2027. Book The Lives of Others tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Lives of Others (Photos by Manuel Harlan)