Unpacking assorted tubs of carrot sticks and salad, Keira Knightley winces apologetically. How apropos that she should consider the impact that her lunch might have on my audio recording when we are here to discuss The Lives of Others, a new play in which the characters are divided between the spies and the spied-upon. Based on the Oscar-winning 2006 film and set in East Berlin in 1984, the play stars Knightley as Christa-Maria, a theatre actor in a relationship with a director, Georg, played by Luke Thompson.
Earwigging on them is Wiesler (Stephen Dillane), the Stasi officer whose principles are gradually challenged and weakened by his round-the-clock exposure to this cultured couple. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s original movie opens with an interrogation scene in which a persecuted citizen is grilled relentlessly for 40 hours – the length of time it takes, according to Wiesler, for a suspect to crack under questioning. I have only been allotted one-fortieth of that time with Knightley and Thompson, who has brought along his own leafy lunch to the north London town hall where rehearsals are under way.
But I am still hopeful of extracting a few details about what the play’s visionary writer-director Robert Icke has up his sleeve. This is the man who introduced Sliding Doors-style alternate-reality scenes into Romeo and Juliet, put a countdown clock on stage in Oedipus (and others), and added the Beach Boys to Oresteia. Interrogation techniques turn out not to be necessary today.
It’s almost musical.” Which is odd, laughs the 41-year-old Knightley, “because Rob hates dancing. He is not a man who dances.” She has some beans of her own to spill. Thompson believes this lends the stage version an advantage over the movie: “Bringing a story about watching into the theatre is maybe even better, because the audience is literally peering in on what’s happening.
Whereas in a film, there’s the barrier of the screen.” Only when I ask whether they are using the play’s new Max Richter score during rehearsals does Thompson become remotely tight-lipped: “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that.” Knightley throws caution to the wind: “We are using it in rehearsal, yeah. Everyone’s in the room: we’ve got the sound designer, the costume designer, the video designer …” Video, eh? Icke used screens in the penetrating version of Orwell’s 1984 which he co-adapted with Duncan Macmillan; in his Hamlet, the Ghost turned up on CCTV.
It’s a convention that risks seeming passe now. But then you ask: ‘Who is surveying me?’” In the same year that The Lives of Others was released, she became part of the first wave of public figures to discover that their phone messages had been hacked by tabloids. How far has that helped her understand the sort of paranoia that dominates the play?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
