THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, adapted and directed by Robert Icke
Adelphi Theatre, 411-412 Strand, London WC2R 0NH, until January 9, 2027
This started life as a much-acclaimed German language film which was released in 2006. It won the Oscar, BAFTA, and every other major award going and was praised for its searing insight into a period of oppression in the recent past which was both disturbing and mesmerizing in equal measure.
Today, it serves as a reminder of just how fragile our freedoms are and it's only proper therefore that one of our most audacious theater makers, Robert Icke, has taken on the job adapting and directing it. Icke shows us how, in many ways, it works even better on stage.
It's set in East Berlin in 1984 at the fag end of old the Communist regime, where the Stasi had 300,000 staff who had files on 4 million East Germans. It was a society stuck in a sort of paranoid derangement. It was a world where nothing was private, every word carried consequence, and the state held power not just over lives, but over thought, speech and imagination itself. After the Wall fell and citizens were allowed to access their old files, many found out that it was long trusted friends or family members who were informing on them.
Icke has brought together an impressive, starry, cast for this and it marks a welcome return to the West End for Stephen Dillane. He plays the dutiful Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler who is ordered by his mercenary boss Grubitz (Paul Higgins) to spy on the playwright Georg Dreyman (Luke Thompson) at the request of Minister Hempf (a frightening Andrew Woodall). Hempf has desires on Dreyman's girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland, played by Keira Knightley. Surrounded by gray men Thompson and Knightley bring some welcome star charisma to their roles as a 'normal' couple swept up in the evil machinations of the state. Knightley is great on Christa-Maria's futile pragmatism, which she thinks will save her.
Later, disillusioned by Hempf's and Grubitz's motives, and being increasingly moved by the passion of Dreyman's circle of friends, Wiesler begins protecting the playwright by not reporting very much. When Dreyman secretly gets an article published in the West about East German suicide rates, Christa-Maria is blackmailed into betraying the location of the hidden typewriter he had used (all such instruments of sedition were tightly regulated). Wiesler is then moved to betray his side. Dillane brings a wonderful poignance to a man slowly decompressing and finding again some semblance of the humanity in himself.
It's all meticulously plotted with key characters in high-stakes predicaments and Icke does wonders in pulling together all the dramatic and emotional strands and keeping the pace up. It runs a tight 2 hours without interval. As usual he has surrounded himself with a top-class team and the large cast of 16, enhanced by an army of 'supernumeraries', lend the crucial party scene an epic scale we'd normally only see in musicals (the usual tenants of this large theater).
Hildegarde Bechtler's sets and costumes are a miasma of '80s beiges and browns and the vast revolving multi-roomed apartment is beautifully detailed. Jon Clark's lighting spans the naturalistic and more expressionist elements with finesse and indeed is crucial to the dramatic momentum, for when Wiesler, 'upstairs', dons his headphones to listen-in the lights come up in the apartment. It all adds to the sense of disturbing, fragmented reality. His listening post is at the side of the stage but, headphones on, he wanders freely though the apartment as if he's a ghost.
Music is always key for Icke, and Giles Thomas's sound design and 'additional' music is greatly enhanced by another impressive original score by Max Richter, whose constant, very filmic, underscoring brings a great emotional punch to the piece. So does the period b&w video design by Tal Yarden, which makes the, thankfully brief, interrogation scenes even more tense.
In the end it's an utterly compelling adaptation which deftly intertwines moral political quandaries without ever preaching and yet has much to say to us today about the relationship between art and politics.
