Keira Knightley will return to the West End stage for the first time in 15 years in an adaptation of the Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others.
The play, adapted and directed by Robert Icke and with music by Max Richter, will open at the Adelphi theatre in London this autumn. Knightley will portray an actor in East Germany in 1984 who is placed under state surveillance along with her novelist partner, played by Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson. Stephen Dillane has been cast as the Stasi captain who spies on their relationship.
Producer Sonia Friedman, continuing her creative partnership with Icke after hits including Oedipus, said it would be an “unexpected” and “thrilling” take on writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film. Icke, she said, has a “rare ability to combine huge ideas with real emotional truth”.
The Lives of Others, continued Friedman, unfolds in a place and time “where nothing is private, every word carries consequence, and the state holds power not just over lives, but over thought, speech and imagination itself”. The play is “a reminder of how fragile those freedoms are, and of the cost and courage required to hold on to them”.
As such, it returns to themes explored in Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Almeida in 2014. Since then, Icke has become one of British theatre’s most prominent auteurs, with his recent productions including a version of Romeo and Juliet that replays some of the tragedy’s scenes to imagine alternative outcomes.
The Lives of Others will be designed by Hildegard Bechtler, and will run at the Adelphi theatre from 14 October to 9 January. The Adelphi was most recently home to Back to the Future: The Musical, which closed earlier this month and begins a UK tour in October.
Knightley, who wrote and illustrated a children’s book last year, is voicing Dolores Umbridge for a new series of Harry Potter audiobooks. She appeared alongside Damian Lewis in the West End in Martin Crimp’s updated version of Molière’s The Misanthrope in 2009 and again, this time alongside Elisabeth Moss, in The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman in 2011. She made her Broadway debut in 2015 in the title role of Thérèse Raquin, adapted from Émile Zola’s novel.
