Keira Knightley makes a striking return to the London stage in Robert Icke’s magnificent adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning 2006 German film about the GDR’s surveillance state in the 1980s.
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Knightley → make → 1980s
As the marquee name she is fittingly cast as Christa-Marie Sieland, the bright, brittle star of the East Berlin theatre scene - all professional sheen and charm until a devastating scene that Knightley performs with wrenching conviction.
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Knightley → cast → conviction
Indeed, you could almost call it a gesamtkunstwerk - a “total artwork” - so vital are design, sound and music to Icke’s vision.
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design → call → vision
Christa lives with playwright Georg Dreyman (Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson, heroically fleshing out a role somewhat lacking in colour), whose faith in the socialist utopia is frayed by the blacklisting and suicide of a comrade.
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faith → live → comrade
Both are spied upon by Gerd Wiesler (outstanding Stephen Dillane), a weary true believer slowly realising that his masters have feet of clay, and seduced by the transforming power of art.
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masters → spy → art
Headphones on, he ambles monkishly through Hildegard Bechtler’s revolving, bifurcating apartment set, with its gauze panels showing grainy, magnified spycam and interrogation footage – a metaphor for the ease with which the state intruded on its subjects’ lives.
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state → amble → lives
A vast cast of supernumeraries suggest how authoritarian collectivism crushes individuals.
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collectivism → suggest → individuals
Knightley’s Christa may be flighty and somewhat unstable – we see her squirreling pills from the bathroom cabinet.
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her → see → cabinet
But it is the solid, decent Georg who suffers a lack of imagination and empathy when the attentions of the malign government minister Hempf (Andrew Woodall, chilling) light upon her.
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attentions → suffer → her
Wiesler is portrayed as the interrogator’s interrogator, wringing confessions from suspects over gruelling 40-hour grillings, and with a nose for sedition.
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Wiesler → portray → sedition
Yet he is outmanoeuvred by the younger, less diligent but more politically acute Grubitz (Paul Higgins, alternating between anxious fury and arch asides about how much he hates theatre).
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he → outmanoeuvre → theatre
Knightley, Thompson and Higgins are excellent, and there is sterling supporting work from Calum Finlay, Irfan Shamji and Nick Holder.
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Knightley → be → Finlay
But it’s impossible to take your eyes off Dillane, with his grey demeanour, exhausted flyaway hair and small, fussy gestures.
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it → ’ → demeanour
His comic timing when he pecks out dialogue for a play about Lenin and his mother, instead of filing an accurate report, is impeccable.
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he → peck → report
Icke stunningly and elegantly opens up the closed worlds of the observer and the observed depicted in the film.
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Icke → open → film
So too is the use of slightly outdated Western music (70s Bowie, Cass Elliot), giving glimmers of hedonistic joy in the drab East.
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use → give → East
Even the metatheatricality here – the visible stagehands hauling the set around, the message that even Stasi officers are playing a role – is entirely earned.
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officers → haul → role
German theatre is famously a top-down affair driven by visionaries.
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theatre → drive → visionaries
So Icke and his cast may have smirked at Dreyman’s line: “The play’s just a recipe: the director’s the chef
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director → smirk → line
This five-star review comes with a quibble: the insistence on theatre as a humanising and a revolutionary force verges on the irksome.
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insistence → come → irksome
I don’t deny artists played their part in the gradual erosion of the GDR (which I visited while working in West Berlin aged 18 in 1984, the year the play is set).
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play → deny → 1984
Late on, footage shows crowds hacking down the Berlin Wall in 1989, and I’m pretty sure not all of them were writers and actors.
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all → show → them
Like I say, a minor objection.
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I → say → ?
It’s great to have Knightley back on the London stage after 15 years, alongside Dillane and Thompson in a fine, big cast.
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It → ’ → cast
Icke, best known for his radical Shakespeares and startlingly reworked classics, here brilliantly re
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Icke → know → Shakespeares
examines the recent past at a time when we’re arguably more surveilled, monitored, and eavesdropped-upon than ever.
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we → examine → time
The Aporia
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