The Lives of Others | Adelphi Theatre | ★★★★☆

With a flourish typical of maverick theatre director Robert Icke, The Lives of Others begins with the theatre lights still blazing. A Stasi officer marches onto the stage and directly addresses the audience. “We are under attack at all times,” he muses as an interrogation takes place behind him. He reveals some of the methods used when interviewing those suspected of subversion: keep them awake, force them to repeat their story – the guilty will repeat the same words over and over again while the innocent are more likely to deviate. We have ways of making you talk…

It’s a slick way of placing the audience in the position of collaborator, sitting alongside the protagonist as he spies on the men and women of East Germany. We follow Gerd Wiesler, a true believer in the Communist cause, albeit one whose career has faltered. “You don’t even sleep with your students,” quips his superior, who was once his inferior. He’s played with a wistful melancholy by the brilliant Stephen Dillane, although flashes of steel glint beneath the surface. 

An element of chaos is injected into Wiesler’s predictable life when he begins surveilling the young playwright Georg Dreyman, who’s suspected of… something. Nobody’s sure what, but there’s an air of sedition to this bright young thing, at least according to the terrifying Minister Hempf, who just happens to be in love with Dreyman’s girlfriend.

Keira Knightley is extremely Keira Knightley

Thus we are introduced to our star, Keira Knightley, who plays the promising young actress Christa-Maria Sieland, a woman who seems to occupy a different reality to the inhabitants of this dreary world, forever clad in fabulous silk blouses and shimmering heels.

The Lives of Others is a kind of love story, at heart: between the director and his girlfriend, but also between Wiesler and the young couple, who show him a glimpse of a different life.

It sounds grim but there are moments of levity, too. One sequence sees Wiesler listening in as the playwright pens an incriminating letter. For reasons perhaps known not even to himself, the Stasi man covers for him, instead writing out excerpts of a fictitious – and atrocious – play about a young Lenin and his mother. 

While it’s based on the Oscar-winning 2006 German-language film, theatre feels like the perfect medium for this story. The two parallel lives are allowed to unspool in tandem: the colourful, passionate one inhabited by the bohemian artists and the grey, drab world in which Wiesler resides. The officer is a kind of spectre in their home, there and not there, listening but unseen. 

The Lives of Others: Incredibly stylish

It’s all incredibly stylish. The extremely East German-looking flat – lots of mid-century furniture and gaudily-patterned wallpaper – is beautifully put together, a vast, rotating thing with walls made of transparent gauze, allowing you to peer into every crevice of this couple’s home. Sometimes we see grainy video recordings of the characters projected across the walls. Other times black curtains race in from the top and sides of the stage to frame a character. For a play about a man sitting quietly in an attic, it’s incredibly kinetic.

It’s also excellently acted by a cast as big as any I’ve seen in the West End in recent years, with more than enough people to populate a pretty jumping party at the couple’s flat. Paul Higgins (The Thick of It) offers some menacing light relief as the ambitious sycophant Minister Grubitz, Luke Thompson has an innocent kind of charm as Dreyman, and Keira Knightley is very much Keira Knightley, a magnetic presence, but one whose star power tends to shine brighter than her stage prowess.

The first hour is near-perfect: unbearably tense and undeniably thrilling. Things spiral towards the end, though, with so many moving parts on this moving stage that the action becomes muddy; the sequence that should be the emotional crux happens almost without you noticing. This point arrives around the three quarter mark, and while there’s a narrative inevitability to the way things unfold beyond this point, the pacing is a little unsatisfying.

But Icke has vision like few other theatre directors and his production hums with an ominous energy, capturing the terrifying menace of Stasi East Germany and the brightness of the lights extinguished too soon during those bleak years.