Keira Knightley Returns to Stage in 'The Lives of Others' — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Keira Knightley and Luke Thompson star in Robert Icke's stage adaptation of "The Lives of Others," set in East Berlin 1984; Knightley plays theatre actor Christa-Maria, Thompson her director boyfriend Georg, and Stephen Dillane the Stasi officer Wiesler who surveils them.
- The production uses a revolving stage so audiences simultaneously see Christa-Maria and Georg and their eavesdropper, paired with video design and a new Max Richter score that both Knightley and Thompson confirmed is already being used in rehearsals.
- Knightley revealed she was among the first wave of public figures whose phones were hacked by tabloids in 2006 — the same year the original film was released — saying 'I knew I was being followed and then I could see that I was being followed,' unlike the play's characters who never know when they are monitored.
- The cast's reading list includes Anna Funder's "Stasiland," which called von Donnersmarck's film 'a fantasy narrative that could not have taken place' under the GDR and accused it of inadvertently helping former Stasi agents launder their reputations.
- In 2014, 43 veterans of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit withdrew from operations against Palestinians, with one whistleblower citing the original film as the catalyst for realizing he and his colleagues 'were similar to the kind of oppressive intelligence in oppressive regimes.'
- Knightley hasn't been on stage for 11 years ('small children, no sleep' is her explanation), and tickets for the play peak at £225 — a price point she half-jokingly blames for the now-ubiquitous standing ovation.
Why it matters: The production lands at a moment when surveillance has shifted from Cold War paranoia to smartphone-era self-censorship, and Knightley's casting — a tabloid-hacking survivor playing a watched citizen — turns the show into a live referendum on who watches whom. At £225 a ticket, it's also a commercial bet that prestige surveillance drama can still fill West End seats after the play's writer-director Robert Icke's last major adaptation, the 2013 '1984,' ran for years.
Ask SkimNews
