Keira Knightley's theatre return in The Lives of Others is a must-see – review - The Independent

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As anyone who's lost themselves in Berlin's fascinating Stasi Museum will know, East Germany's secret police turned spying into a kind of terrifying magic. They shrank cameras into jacket buttons and disguised listening devices in watering cans, then used the resulting evidence to whisk people's whole lives away in a puff of smoke. So it's fitting that Robert Icke's ingenious staging of the 2006 German espionage thriller The Lives of Others feels like a vast act of transfiguration – turning grimy state machinery into heartstopping visual poetry.

Luke Thompson brings a sweet-faced hopefulness to the central role of celebrated playwright Georg Dreyman, who's so full of faith in the bright communist future that he can't ever imagine the state turning on him. But this is the paranoid East Germany of the Eighties, and seasoned spy Gerd Wiesler (Stephen Dillane) has been tasked with collecting fresh, illustrious scalps for his careerist new boss, Grubitz (Paul Higgins). In a scene of lyrical beauty, his modernist flat slowly revolves as black-gloved state functionaries lace it with microphones and wires, moving with the choreographed grace of carousel horses.

While Dreyman chooses optimism, his girlfriend and favoured leading lady Christa-Maria Sieland has a more complicated relationship with truth and hope. It's a time-worn West End trope to cast a real-life Hollywood star as a 'famous actress' in a play, but putting Keira Knightley in this role works on a deeper level. She's got a brooding sulkiness that suits this conflicted, enigmatic performer – life only seems real to her when she's acting, finding relief in borrowed words for all the emotions that hang heavily, unexpressed, however much she tosses her head to shake them off.

Her private suffering has a constant audience in Wiesler, who sits on one side of the stage, switching between headphones covering different rooms of the apartment so that he can catch every sob or desperate scream. Dillane gives this act of listening an almost spiritual dimension, sinking to the floor in reverence, and keeping her secrets from his colleagues as though they're confessions heard in church.

He's breaking the rules, of course. But what the original film's writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck illustrates here is that compliance to this contorted system of government is only possible for people who are willing to twist themselves into ugly shapes. Dreyman's blacklisted director Jerska reels into his former friend's flat like a furious ghost – he stood up to the state and has suffered for it. Nick Holder fills this scene with righteous fire and desperate frankness as he says what everyone else is too frightened to.

Icke's staging here creates a series of beautifully-designed prisons; spaces that trap, stifle and ultimately destroy the people who live in them. Sliding screens move at breakneck speed to shrink the audience's view of the stage into a tiny, cinematic close-up. Designer Hildegard Bechtler creates a midcentury apartment whose covetable modernist comforts can vanish in an instant, replaced by desolate institutional punishment.

So it feels strange that Icke lets all this carefully built-up tension and menace dissipate in an over-explained final scene, set in the safety of Dreyman's complacent, post-communist future. The old mechanisms have been replaced by new ones. But decades on, artists still have things they must stay silent on, or lose everything.

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