Review Round-Ups

The critics sound off on The Lives of Others in the West End

Reviews have landed for the show, featuring Keira Knightley, Luke Thompson and Stephen Dillane

Alex Wood

| London |

2 November 2026

tolo rroundup — Stephen Dillane in The Lives of Others, photo by Manuel Harlan

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage

★★★★★

“Ready to listen?,” says Stephen Dillane’s Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler, as he saunters up through the audience, to begin a lecture on the East German security service’s torture techniques. “Now the story begins,” he says later, as he puts on headphones to listen to activities inside the bugged flat of his suspect, the playwright Georg Dreyman (Luke Thompson) and his glamorous actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, played by Keira Knightley.

“Inside those remarks is the clue to director Robert Icke’s gripping stage adaptation of Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck’s magnificent 2006 film about the way the secret police in a divided Germany spied on its own citizens, recording and interfering in their lives, breaking its own subjects under the guise of being the “shield and sword” of the state. At two hours long, it has the pace and suspense of a thriller but wrapped in its heart is an examination of the purpose of art – and the reflective nature of stories to destroy or enhance lives.”

Nick Curtis, The Standard

★★★★★

“Knightley, Thompson and [Paul] Higgins are excellent, and there is sterling supporting work from Calum Finlay, Irfan Shamji and Nick Holder. But it’s impossible to take your eyes off Dillane, with his grey demeanour, exhausted flyaway hair and small, fussy gestures. His comic timing when he pecks out dialogue for a play about Lenin and his mother, instead of filing an accurate report, is impeccable.”

Alice Saville, The Independent

★★★★

“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 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.”

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

★★★★

“The main criticism levelled at The Lives of Others was that the GDR police state was too tightly controlled to have allowed the likes of Wiesler to carve out space for saving kindness, let alone amend records and (comically) fabricate play-scripts. In a programme note, von Donnersmarck affirms a hope that his fiction “might be truer than an actual true story”. And the achievement of the production, played without interval and often using a stage revolve to create a sense of remorseless scrutiny, is that it has its own strange, nightmarish logic.”

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian

★★★

“Dillane’s Wiesler sits listening to these secrets after their apartment has been bugged. He also weaves physically between them, and it is a theatrical way of showing the intimacy and intrusion building in his surveillance. But where the film was able to deliver Wiesler’s interiority through lingering closeups and looks, there are fewer ways of opening up his inner world when the story relies on the same mode of suggestion to convey his disenchantment with a system he has believed in, but which he now realises is corrupt or exploited by Grubitz and Hempf.”

Dave Fargnoli, The Stage

★★★

“Dillane plays Wiesler as a blank space in a grey uniform. Softly spoken and self-effacing, he reveals little about his motivations, usually responding to questions with monosyllabic mumbles. But Dillane communicates an impressive degree of nuance through body language and expression, passing through phases of panic, grief, and acceptance as the story unfolds.

“Unknowingly living under his constant scrutiny, Keira Knightley gives a committed – if never entirely convincing – performance as Sieland. Her interpretation of the character is raw and overtly driven by desperation, willing to do anything to protect her career but paradoxically insecure about her talent. Her relationship with Thompson’s Dreyman feels subtly strained and transactional.”