Theatre: The Lives of Others
Adelphi Theatre
★★★★✩
This isn’t the first play to depict the surveillance of an east Berlin apartment during the Cold War. In 2019 Ella Hickson’s Anna at the National Theatre conveyed the ubiquity of snooping by East Germany’s much feared Stasi by giving each member of the audience a pair of headphones with which to listen to the inhabitants of an apartment viewed through a soundproofed wall of glass.
The technique cast us the audience into the country’s legion of spies and voyeurs, a perspective that is at the core of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning 2007 film The Lives of Others, now adapted for the stage for the first time.
The show’s cast is led by Kiera Knightley who is also the main attraction in the new series of the action thriller Black Doves, which has just landed on Netflix (her breakthrough in Bend It Like Beckham feels so very long ago). But the other main attraction here is Robert Icke, a director whose reworked Greek tragedies can keep you awake at night.
The year is 1984 – a return to the dark era of oppressive techniques used by Europe’s communist regimes before Gorbachev’s reforms. The methods are no doubt back in vogue in today’s Russia though without the political idealism that gave state thuggery a moral pretext.
Stephen Dillane’s Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler is an old-school interrogator. Like the film, the play opens with an example of Wiesler’s methods. His interviewee is a gibbering, sleep-deprived wreck before he spills the information. Liars stick to prepared sentences, he tells us. Yes, we audience the audience are the regime once again. This time we are at oppressor school. Honest testimony varies, continues Wiesler. Who knew?
He is pointed by a superior in the direction of a favoured playwright Dreymann (Luke Thompson) and the partner with whom he lives, the glamorous star of his latest play, Christa (Knightley). While they are out, Wiesler’s team of bug-planting specialists descend on their apartment like locusts. It is only a matter of time before the conscientious officer, who is installed with his headphones in a nearby bolthole, discovers that the trusted Dreymann is, in fact, involved in something subversive.
But just as this betrayal of socialism is revealed, the microphones also pick up visits by Hempf, the minister of culture (a stone-faced Andrew Woodall) who is blackmailing Christa into having violent sex sessions with him. Wiesler is appalled.
Hildegard Bechtler’s ambitious design of the apartment is a translucent revolving edifice. The point here is to convey the extent to which privacy is compromised by surveillance. But the most effective way in which Icke illustrates the violation is by placing Dillane’s Wiesler and his headphones in the very same room as the couple. Both high-concept ideas work, but only up to a point. The theatricality of the devices distracts from the tawdry banality of listening in on peoples lives.
Still, Knightley is on excellent form as she steadily reduces the star wattage of her character as if using a dimmer switch until her Christa’s light is extinguished by her oppressors. However, it is Dillane who makes this adaptation his own as the pitiless certainty of his Wiesler crumbles, revealing a humanity he never knew he had.
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