Theatre review: The Lives of Others

He's a big name in his own right now but Robert Icke continues to be inspired by Ivo van Hove, a director who alternates stage classics with adaptations of films. And it's the latter Icke tackles in his latest West End venture, taking us back to the Cold War for his version of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others. In 1984 East Germany, Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Stephen Dillane) is sent to the premiere of a new play to pick out artists likely to be dissidents. He chooses playwright Georg Dreyman (Luke Thompson,) and is put personally in charge of monitoring the many bugs the secret police have planted in the flat Georg shares with his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Transphobia Ltd Employee Keira Knightley.) In fact there's very little they discuss that could be called controversial, until Georg's friend, the blacklisted director Jerska (Nick Holder) kills himself.

This prompts Georg to write an anonymous article about the high rate of suicides in the supposed communist paradise, and to hatch a plan with friends Wallner (Irfan Shamji) and Hauser (Calum Finlay) to smuggle it out to a West German magazine.

Meanwhile Christa-Maria is getting threatening phone calls from a man demanding to meet up with her - who turns out to be Minister Hempf (Andrew Woodall,) whom she's having an abusive affair with to curry favour with the Stasi. Early on Gerd barks at the night shift officer Udo (Jamie Ankrah) "they're not your friends!" but it's advice he himself starts to have trouble following the more he listens to and sympathises with the couple.

So on one level this is a story about empathy - the way suppressing it while claiming to act for the general good is a major way of keeping an oppressive state in control, as well as the way its resurgence can become a tool to bring that state down - the play drawing a direct line from Gerd's increasing feeling for the couple to the fall of the Iron Curtain. It also questions Christa-Maria's apparent lack of empathy for Jerska and the other suicides.

But it's also a very effective paranoid thriller, although ironically from the audience perspective the tension comes from the characters not being quite paranoid enough: Right to the end Georg is convinced his flat is the one remaining place safe from surveillance, when in fact it's the most thoroughly bugged place he ever goes.

That flat is also the other major character in the story: Hildegard Bechtler is a designer I associate with very solid sets the actors get to interact with a lot, and here we get a few rooms of the apartment, with transparent walls to let us in on the couple's private moments the same way the spies are let in on them. The set spins and breaks apart to take us to other locations, but the flat remains an oppressive central presence, the safe haven that's actually nothing of the sort.

The set does also help confirm some of my concerns about the Adelphi as a venue for a straight play: Anything that doesn't take place in one of its rooms gets pushed downstage, effectively making the entire Upper Circle a severely restricted view for much of the action. It's not quite enough to take away from an intense evening though - Phill had fairly recently been to the former East Germany and was impressed by the accuracy of the Stasi headquarters designs, and the show is just as successful at recreating the oppressive atmosphere of the Cold War.

The Lives of Others by Robert Icke, based on the film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, is booking until the 9th of January at the Adelphi Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan / Pamela Raith.