By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ***

WHEN?: Friday 16 October, opens 29 October and runs through 28 November 2026 RUNTIME: 130 minutes (no interval)

Adapter/director Robert Icke’s most recent leading ladies have gone on to awards success including Sadie Sink (Stage Debut Award for Romeo and Juliet) and a Best Actress Olivier and Tony for Lesley Manville (Oedipus)

• Read on for reasons including how Keira Knightley was last on stage in 2011

Keira Knightley was last on a West End stage 15 years ago and was even nominated for an Olivier for Best Actress In A Supporting Role for a 2009 production of Moliere’s The Misanthrope where she played a flirtatious young woman.

Here Knightley is well-known actress Christa-Maria Sieland under state surveillance in East Germany in 1984 as she juggles lovers including Bridgerton‘s Luke Thompson (A Little Life, Harold Pinter Theatre) as a writer thought sympathetic to a regime deploying the Stasi to spy on citizens under suspicion of opposing the state.

The action opens with filmed excerpts from a Stasi cross-examination which recalls Icke’s own early 1984 (Playhouse Theatre) triumph which reminds us of the safe hands we’re in.

Stephen Dillane plays interrogator Gerd Wiesler and his is very much the starring role as he sets to understand Thompson’s writer Georg Dreyman better by bugging him and listening in himself.

Those familiar with Icke’s fondness of a ticking clock will perhaps be pleased that it’s a device not overused here once it’s confirmed how torturous a 41-hour interrogation masterminded by Dillane’s initially unsympathetic and appropriately-surnamed Wiesler might be.

Paul Higgins (The Unbelievers, Royal Court) gives arguably the best performance here as the annoying, subservient middle manager out of their depth and ripe for being played.

The Lives Of Others is based on a 2006 German film we’ve not seen and the mood is very Channel 4’s Deutschland 83, a time of paranoia dogging the Berlin Wall that is evoked hauntingly here.

Knightley’s as charismatic and magnetic as you’d want a successful actress with a complicated love life to be but her character doesn’t feel much of a stretch. Much more interesting and similar thematic ground is her Netflix series Black Doves which returns soon for an eagerly -awaited 2nd season.

Thompson is better as the conflicted writer and he deserves to be the leading man in a play onstage soon rather than the supporting roles of which we have most recently seen him tread the boards for.

The Adelphi’s a curious choice for this production – we assume the Knightley/Thompson combination is thought bumper box office – and is more sympathetic to large-scale musicals.

The stage’s revolve is doing a lot of work here to give us many different locations.

There’s a satisfying twist at the end of which we will say no more but the feeling we were left with was that we wanted more from Knightley’s character in a story about surveillance where it was more about those listening in than those being bugged which didn’t feel particularly theatric material.

• Main pictures by via Facebook courtesy Adelphi Theatre Tickets
• Have you seen a Keira Knightley show before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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