Review Roundup: THE LIVES OF OTHERS at Adelphi Theatre

What are critics saying about The Lives of Others?

London Box Office

"A technical coup de théâtre and is as stylish as hell"

★★★★★

Reviewer: Stuart King

"With half a dozen costume changes as befits a glamorous star of the stage, Knightley looks every bit the commanding presence but also taps the inherent vulnerabilities of being forced to submit to Hempf’s regular sexual demands, or lose her career.

As the apartment set revolves, the large supporting cast are excellently choreographed at parties and the initial bugging installation scene, imbuing a claustrophobic essence to the expansive Adelphi stage. These moments are often accompanied by an incongruous piece of western popular music — a burst of Bowie, and at one point the instrumental version of Noel Harrison’s The Windmills of Your Mind. The musical interludes serve to gel the scenes beautifully. Bechtler also deploys neat black-out letterboxing to cover behind the scenes changes adding a slick and ominous ‘spooks’ feel to proceedings."

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WhatsOnStage

"A deeply moving and utterly spellbinding evening of theatre"

★★★★★

Reviewer: Sarah Crompton

"Knightley, whispering into her lover’s ear, lends the line real urgency. She is fragile, febrile and utterly convincing as the tortured actor who knows with absolute certainty that “an artist cannot survive the world you’ve made.” Icke has transmuted a film about heroic resistance to authority and the moments that people crack or rebel into a play about the power of art and the need for the kind of understanding it provokes, subtly but insistently altering the focus.

His vision is an immense achievement not least because it is nigh-on perfect in execution. Dillane, always excellent, has never been better than he is as Wiesler, letting each moment of disillusion register while seeming utterly still and contained. As Dreyman, Thompson is equally still, equally powerful, catching the character’s essential decency, gradually eroded and transformed into opposition by the situation he finds himself in. Paul Higgins as Wiesler’s ambitious, unprincipled boss is also superb, constantly moving and weaselly."

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The Standard

"Keira Knightley's return to the stage is revolutionary"

★★★★★

Reviewer: Nick Curtis

"Knightley, Thompson and Higgins are excellent, and there is sterling supporting work from Calum Finlay, Irfan Shamji and Nick Holder. But it’s impossible to take your eyes off Dillane, with his grey demeanour, exhausted flyaway hair and small, fussy gestures. His comic timing when he pecks out dialogue for a play about Lenin and his mother, instead of filing an accurate report, is impeccable.

Icke stunningly and elegantly opens up the closed worlds of the observer and the observed depicted in the film. The rich texture and the command of ominous mood here is emblematic of his skill. So too is the use of slightly outdated Western music (70s Bowie, Cass Elliot), giving glimmers of hedonistic joy in the drab East."

Read the review here.

Stephen Dillane in The Lives of Others. Photo by Manuel Harlan

The Independent

"Keira Knightley's West End return is a must-see"

★★★★

Reviewer: Alice Saville

"While Dreyman chooses optimism, his girlfriend and favoured leading lady Christa-Maria Sieland has a more complicated relationship with truth and hope. It's a time-worn West End trope to cast a real-life Hollywood star as a 'famous actress' in a play, but putting Keira Knightley in this role works on a deeper level. She's got a brooding sulkiness that suits this conflicted, enigmatic performer – life only seems real to her when she's acting, finding relief in borrowed words for all the emotions that hang heavily, unexpressed, however much she tosses her head to shake them off.

Her private suffering has a constant audience in Wiesler, who sits on one side of the stage, switching between headphones covering different rooms of the apartment so that he can catch every sob or desperate scream. Dillane gives this act of listening an almost spiritual dimension, sinking to the floor in reverence, and keeping her secrets from his colleagues as though they're confessions heard in church."

Read the review here.

The Telegraph

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★★★★

Reviewer: Dominic Cavendish

"Icke is largely faithful to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s screenplay but moves exterior-location incidents indoors, a practical step that heightens the paranoia and claustrophobia. He also intensifies the mood of untrammelled authoritarianism. There’s an overwhelming show of force when the Stasi team move in to fit the bugging devices. And in a harrowing sequence, Andrew Woodall’s Hempf grabs Knightley’s compromised leading lady by the hair while she’s on her knees – sexual assault in the bedroom curtailed only by a distraction contrived by the eavesdropping, appalled spy.

The main criticism levelled at The Lives of Others was that the GDR police state was too tightly controlled to have allowed the likes of Wiesler to carve out space for saving kindness, let alone amend records and (comically) fabricate play-scripts. In a programme note, von Donnersmarck affirms a hope that his fiction “might be truer than an actual true story”. And the achievement of the production, played without interval and often using a stage revolve to create a sense of remorseless scrutiny, is that it has its own strange, nightmarish logic."

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Financial Times

"The Lives of Others is an unsettling must-see"

★★★★

Reviewer: Sarah Hemming

"Beautifully precise physical performances express the everyday horrors of living under authoritarian rule. A party becomes a minefield; a lover could turn informer. For artists, every word is a dance between integrity and compromise. Georg and Christa-Maria have chosen survival, he by distancing himself from a blacklisted director; she by sleeping with a powerful party official.

The actors trace precisely and eloquently the cost this exacts. Thompson’s glossy confidence and boy-next-door bounce gradually drain away as he realises that he’s a pawn; Knightley’s defiantly tilted chin and poised charm give way to brittle, strung-out despair. Dillane, meanwhile, is sensationally good as a man eaten away by the sordid reality of grubbing about in people’s intimate lives. "

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The Guardian

"Keira Knightley brings star power to Robert Icke’s Stasi drama"

★★★

Reviewer: Arifa Akbar

"All that is conveyed by inference and suggestion in the film but takes on the feverish nature of a melodrama on stage. Luke Thompson plays writer George Dreyman, and seems too puppyish in the role. Knightley is his girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, a stage actor and the object of jealous lust for venal government minister Hempf (Andrew Woodall), who seeks to destroy Dreyman so he can claim her. She gives a committed performance, but the character feels overheated and underwritten. She wears glamorous dresses with cinched waists and coiffed hair, looking like a woman who could be from wartime Berlin rather than 1980s East Germany, and quotes lines from Romeo and Juliet which hang oddly: this couple are not star-crossed teenagers but grownups carrying their own secrets."

Read the review here.

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The Lives of Others Tickets