Review of the Week: The Lives of Others at the Adelphi theatre

Adelphi theatre, London WC2, until 9 January 2027

It’s strange to see a Robert Icke adaptation of a German film staged at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s colossal Adelphi theatre, a venue recently vacated by the Back to the Future musical. Both are screen-to-stage adaptations, true, but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 movie doesn’t have quite the same nostalgic pull and there aren't any songs. This is a most unlikely would-be blockbuster.

Icke is known for reimagining the classics, from Hamlet (with Andrew Scott) to Oedipus to Ibsen. But the play The Lives of Others most closely resembles is 1984, Icke’s 2013 Orwell adaptation with Duncan Macmillan, in its representation of a surveillance state. As luck would have it, Von Donnersmarck’s story mostly takes place in the actual year of 1984, when nobody in East Germany imagined that the Berlin wall had just five years left. There’s a lot the characters don’t know.

In 1984, Icke and Macmillan made great use of television screens to dramatise watching and being watched. Here, despite the occasional projection, the presiding metaphor is theatre itself. It’s not just that Georg Dreyman (Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson) is a playwright and Christa-Maria Sieland (Keira Knightley) an actress, both celebrated by the regime but radicalised into dissidence by the suicide of a blacklisted director. Every dictatorship is a pageant of power and every citizen is half an actor, performing obedience to the state while trying to maintain an inner wall between their private and public selves. The play is about writing, too, ultimately revolving around an anonymous magazine article, a hidden typewriter and a comically fake play about Lenin.

Ironically, Georg and Christa-Maria aren’t paranoid enough. Even in their most intimate moments, they have an audience of one, unseen and undetected. Gerd Wiesler (Stephen Dillane) is a morose Stasi agent tasked with monitoring the couple through a spider’s web of bugs, headphones clamped around his pensive face. In the film, he can only listen but on stage he becomes a watcher, too, gradually slipping into the apartment to sit among his targets like a ghost as his empathy and disillusionment grow. Ostensibly, he switches sides because he is horrified to learn that the surveillance is really motivated by culture minister Hempf (Andrew Woodall)’s sexual designs on Christa-Maria, and profoundly moved by the sound of Georg playing piano, but emotionally we feel that he is drawn to a life of courage and companionship so different from his lonely voyeurism. The scenes in the apartment have a vibrant glow whereas Wiesler dwells in a chilly shadow-world that’s as grey as his suit. Dillane, a master of repression, plays a cold warrior defrosting.

As Wiesler mentally defects from the regime, Christa-Maria is tormented into complicity. Her shining vivacity proves brittle and glassy under pressure. In her first London stage role for 15 years, Knightley provides an electric shock of glamour – a star playing a star – if not quite enough tragedy. Paul Higgins, who displayed a talent for weak men revelling in the abuse of unearned power in The Thick of It, is fabulously loathsome as the philistine apparatchik Grubitz. The Stasi creeps cite Stalin’s infamous line about Soviet artists being “engineers of the human soul” but human beings are not machines to be fixed and art is not a toolkit. The play therefore doesn’t insist that the GDR’s system of control was bad (must we be told?), nor that artistic freedom is important (ditto), but shows us how individuals survived in such a cage-state and how much of themselves they could preserve. When one character declares “life ain’t no play and no one ever changes”, he’s only half-right.

Perhaps the star of the show is Hildegard Bechtler, Icke’s regular set designer. Her centrepiece is a revolving apartment with gauzy, translucent walls that forbid privacy, but the set shape-shifts with uncanny elegance to suddenly reveal a cafe, a TV studio or the Adelphi’s own backstage. Exploiting the generous budget, 24 “supernumeraries” (extras to you and me) give the group scenes a real sense of hubbub. The music is wonderful, too, with tracks from David Bowie’s Berlin masterpiece Low threaded throughout and Mama Cass’s Make Your Own Kind of Music deployed to unexpectedly nightmarish effect.

You could certainly say that the play lacks some of the film’s close-up subtlety and grainy eastern-bloc gravitas, but a film that was a moderate hit 20 years ago and cannot currently be streamed in the UK hardly casts an inescapable shadow. Ultimately, a film is a film and a play is a play. This play is a handsome, gripping and fast-moving thriller, thick with Berlin noir and teeming with ideas. The official title is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, but it’s not Donnersmarck’s, is it? It’s Icke’s.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story. His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize