The Lives of Others first night review by PATRICK MARMION: Keira Knightley is a beautiful enigma in this slick portrayal of Stasi surveillance

The Lives of Others (Adelphi Theatre, London) 

Rating:

Catching Keira Knightley on stage is rare enough in itself. But when she's teamed up with Game Of Thrones' Stephen Dillane on this kind of form, something extra special is going on.

The Pirates Of The Caribbean actress has trodden the boards just once in the UK since making her 2009 debut in The Misanthrope.

But now here she is in a fascinating adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-winning 2006 film about the Stasi secret police in East Germany – reconfigured for the stage by one of Britain's canniest directors, Robert Icke.

Ms Knightley plays Christa, an actor in the German Democratic Republic of the 1980s, at the tail end of communism. One half of a perfect power couple, her lover Georg (Bridgerton's Luke Thompson) enjoys the grace and favour of party apparatchiks. 

There is just one horrible catch: Christa is the victim of a coercive relationship with the minister of culture, Hempf (Andrew Woodall).

All this is discovered – unexpectedly – by Dillane's Stasi Captain Gerd, after he sets up a surveillance operation on the couple to investigate possible anti-state activities. 

His story proves pivotal as he reluctantly listens in on Hempf's abuse, undermining his faith in the cradle-to-grave assurances of life under communism.

Far from just a pretty face, Ms Knightley puts herself on the line. At first a beautiful enigma, she talks using playful Shakespearean riddles in Icke's often witty English language translation. 

But beneath it all, she is struggling to protect herself and Georg from Hempf's sexual blackmail as she is pushed to psychological breaking point.

Where she is compromised and distressed by her secret, Dillane is no less compromised by his covert operation. He is proud to be a bloodless official whose every movement is slow and considered – as if he wouldn't scratch his nose without first thinking it through.

The moment he turns, moved to tears by Georg playing piano for Christa, is as touching as it is unexpected. The cold light of his loneliness steadily dawns on him, ahead of another beautifully melancholy scene where he meets Christa seemingly by chance in an empty café.

Georg, meanwhile, is tragically oblivious with only partial knowledge of what's happening to Christa. But, as desk-bound playwrights go, he proves to be unusually ripped in his intimate encounters with her – glossed over by an embarrassed Gerd in his reports to Paul Higgins as the agitated Stasi boss, Grubitz.

Icke embeds all this in a slick, high-tech production steeped in the soul-eating practicalities of surveillance. Set mostly in and around Georg's GDR high rise, ghostly lighting allows walls between rooms to appear alternately solid and transparent.

Ambient sound is no less spooky. Inspired in part by clicking sounds heard on phone taps, there's also Brian Eno and David Bowie's music of the era, supplemented by uneasy interludes composed by Max Richter.

My only beef is the want of originality in adapting a film for the stage. Where are the plays reflecting on our own modes of conformity, the way this one did with the GDR?

 But with acting and production standards this high, we can forgive a show for which tickets miraculously remain – grab them while you can, comrades.