Twenty years or so ago, in a Madrid cinema, I witnessed something I’ve never seen before or since: an entire audience of regular filmgoers bursting into applause at the end of a film.
The film was The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s picture of life in East Germany under the Stasi, and it drew plaudits on all sides. ‘Simply put, it’s stunning,’ wrote Harry Guerin of RTE. ‘It wouldn’t be out of place on any list of the top films of the past five decades.’ Anthony Lane, in a superlative New Yorker review, wrote that if there were any justice, it would receive the Academy Award for best foreign picture (it did). John le Carré called The Lives of Others ‘one of the seminal experiences of my later life,’ and even experts who argued with its plausibility, like Anna Funder (Stasiland) and Timothy Garton Ash (The File), admitted the impact the film had had on them. It was, Funder declared, ‘superb, a thing of beauty.’
The Lives of Others has the production values of an art-film but the pacing and suspense of a thriller
Now a stage-adaptation has opened at the Adelphi Theatre, directed by Robert Icke and starring Keira Knightley and Stephen Dillane. But can it do the original justice?
Set in the GDR in 1984, The Lives of Others tells the story of Gerd Wiesler (played with consummate restraint by the late Ulrich Muhe), a Stasi officer deputed to spy on two artists: the state-celebrated playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend, actress Christa Maria Sieland (Marta Gedeck).
Wiesler’s communism is devout and apparently inflexible. Nothing is realer to him than his Stasi oath to be the Party’s ‘sword and shield,’ nor his daily work of cauterizing enemies of the state for the good of mankind. Yet on discovering he’s been put on the assignment for the most cynical (and uncollective) of reasons, he finds – against all political instincts – his hostility to the artistic couple wavering. Searingly lonely, a man who doesn’t quite exist without his mad bank of bugging devices, Wiesler is seduced down the headphones by the richness of their lives – their circle of friends, the music, books and pillow-talk, the glasses of late-night wine. Before long he is putting all his efficiency and thoroughness not into exposing the pair but protecting them, at a distance, instead. Yet given this is the GDR, the most effectively policed state in the communist world, how long will he succeed before tragedy strikes?
The Lives of Others has the production values of an art-film but the pacing and suspense of a thriller. On the way we get an intimate and chilling portrait of the GDR, that state of 16 million closely monitored citizens trapped behind the Berlin Wall, where you’re either in with the authorities and flourishing, or out – skulking in the half-light of failure or trapped in a cell at Hohenschönhausen, the fearsome state prison. We see the paranoia, the strangled conversations, the awareness of hidden microphones or spies nearby, the eyes and ears of the state. The Berlin Wall that squats over them, unseen and barely mentioned, spawns a swarm of divisions in their daily lives – sealing in thoughts, twisting relationships and imposing, at times, terrible moral choices.
What’s shocking is the layer of normality on top. There are parties, work-lunches, efforts at conviviality and happiness. But the participants’ faces, caught in lingering close-up, tell a different story: one of suspicion, secrecy and shame. This should make for bleak viewing, but von Donnersmarck clearly loves his characters, even the bad ones, and imbues the picture with warmth. A film, he has said, should be a ‘luxurious experience’ where audiences can ‘experience the beauty and vastness of life.’ Few went away from The Lives of Others feeling he’d let them down.
As for the current stage-production, it has had mixed reviews. For Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times, the play is ‘brilliantly slippery and exquisitely acted,’ but Clive Davis at the Times has criticised Icke’s intrusive direction: ‘In the end you are left admiring the bravura flourishes rather than being drawn into the story itself.’ Most telling of all is Arifa Akbar’s review in the Guardian. Noting the power of the original film lay in its ‘subtlety: a maelstrom of emotion rumbling beneath a taut surface,’ she complains that what was ‘conveyed by inference and suggestion in the film…takes on the feverish nature of a melodrama on stage.’ The production, she concludes, ultimately doesn’t manage ‘the immensely difficult task it sets itself.’
None of this, though, is affecting sales. Performances in November are mostly sold out and dress circle tickets are priced at £275. Keira Knightley’s star power aside, audiences clearly feel that in 2026, this is still a tale worth telling. The production, Sarah Hemmings said, ‘makes a story safely stowed in the past feel live and speak to a present in which truth, narrative control, abuse of power and artistic integrity are all scarily back in the spotlight.’
It goes without saying that 24 hours in the old GDR would send us scurrying back to the present, in all its dysfunction, with gratitude and relief. But given The Lives of Others was released in early 2007 – a few months before just the first iPhone went on sale – one might mention other things too: Humza Yousaf’s infamous 2024 hate crime act (which threatened to reach right into people’s homes); the omnipresent phone-cameras recording our words and deeds; the jokes untold and books unwritten; trials which are supposed to be impartial but feel weirdly political in nature. The film has shot up in relevance since its release.
Those unable to get tickets for the play are perhaps the lucky ones. They should make a beeline for the original movie and see it in all its intensity. The closing words of Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review are even truer two decades on: ‘A movie this strong…is never parochial, nor is it period drama. Es ist für uns. It’s for us.’
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