Keira Knightley, Stephen Dillane and Luke Thompson star in Robert Icke’s stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning film about the Stasi, for a limited season at the Adelphi.
Keira Knightley, an Academy Award nominee, stars in The Lives of Others at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, from Wednesday 14 October 2026 to Saturday 9 January 2027. Stephen Dillane and Luke Thompson lead the company with her.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote and directed the German film, which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 2007. Its story is fiction, drawn from the Stasi’s real surveillance of East German writers and artists.
In East Berlin in 1984, a Stasi officer is ordered to spy on a playwright and his actress partner. Listening from the attic above their flat, he is drawn into their lives, and his loyalty to the regime is tested.
Robert Icke, an Olivier Award winner whose stage work includes Oresteia and Oedipus, adapted the film in English and directs it. It is the first time the story has been told on stage. He plays it straight through, in 2 hours and 10 minutes with no interval.
Knightley plays the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. Dillane, an Emmy winner seen in Game of Thrones, plays the Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler, and Thompson, an Olivier nominee seen in Bridgerton, plays the playwright Georg Dreyman.