Knightley on hacking trauma and Stasi surveillance play: 'I knew I was being followed'

Keira Knightley unwraps her lunch—carrot sticks and salad—and winces at the crunch, suddenly aware that the sound might interfere with the recording. The irony is immediate and deliberate. She and Luke Thompson are here to discuss The Lives of Others, a new stage adaptation of the 2006 Oscar-winning film about East Berlin in 1984, where some people watch and others are watched, where privacy becomes a theoretical concept, and where the simple act of being overheard carries weight.

The play centers on Christa-Maria, a theatre actor played by Knightley, and her relationship with a director named Georg, played by Thompson. A Stasi officer named Wiesler, portrayed by Stephen Dillane, listens to everything—their conversations, their silences, the texture of their lives. Director Robert Icke has staged this on a revolving platform, so the audience sees the couple and their eavesdropper simultaneously. Thompson, 38, who has worked with Icke on Hamlet and Oresteia, describes it as "one big set-piece with people coming in and passing batons. It's almost musical." Knightley, 41, notes the constant motion: "We're always on the move." The production includes video design and a new score by Max Richter, tools that Icke has used before to collapse the distance between watcher and watched.

What makes this adaptation resonate now, two decades after the film's release, is how surveillance itself has transformed. Knightley speaks from lived experience. In 2006, the same year the movie premiered, she became part of the first wave of public figures whose phone messages were hacked by tabloids. She knew her privacy had been violated because she could see the evidence—stories published, photographs stolen. "I knew I was being followed and then I could see that I was being followed," she says. "I didn't feel like I was going mad." The characters in the play inhabit a different nightmare: they don't know if they're being monitored, when it might happen, or whether the threat itself is enough to change how they behave. Thompson points to the efficiency of this psychological mechanism. "The best way to create surveillance is for people to do it themselves," he says. In East Germany, estimates suggest there was one informant for every 6.5 citizens—a ratio that made paranoia rational.

The modern parallels are sharper than they appear. Knightley raises the question of whether threats need to be carried out to be effective. "You don't even have to follow through on the threat," she observes. "You just have to put it out there" for people to self-censor. The example she offers is the probing of social media accounts at US immigration—a practice that may or may not be widespread, but the mere suggestion of it changes behavior. Thompson nods in recognition. This is how power operates now: not through constant surveillance but through the belief that surveillance is possible, that someone might be watching, that it's safer to assume you are.

The cast has read Anna Funder's Stasiland, a 2003 account of life in East Germany. Funder praised the film as "superb" but also criticized it as a "fantasy narrative" that couldn't have happened under the actual GDR dictatorship. She argued that the movie needed its hero to act humanely—something totalitarian systems are designed to prevent. Yet the film has had at least one documented real-world impact. In 2014, 43 veterans of an Israeli military intelligence unit withdrew from their roles, protesting their government's treatment of Palestinians. One whistleblower cited The Lives of Others as a catalyst for his awakening, realizing that he and his colleagues "were similar to the kind of oppressive intelligence in oppressive regimes."

Not everyone sees the film as a force for good. When a journalist recommended it to Julie Christie in 2007, she demurred: "I'm not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people communists are." Thompson takes this seriously. "There are characters who are mouthpieces for something along those lines," he acknowledges. "But it's not just a politics play. Part of the fun is that the characters are mysterious and you never know quite which way they're going to go. If what audiences take from the play is 'Communists are awful', then I'd feel like we'd failed."

The conversation drifts toward the economics of theatre. Tickets for The Lives of Others peak at £225—a price that Knightley suggests might explain the standing ovations that have become routine at West End productions. "I took my kids to see a musical recently and we really did enjoy it, but it cost so much that I was, like, 'We are going to love this!'" she says. Thompson offers a counterpoint: the exchange between actors and audience during applause is "the least important or interesting moment." What matters is what stays with people afterward. Knightley laughs at his optimism. "There's me going, 'Maybe it's because the tickets are expensive.' And you're like, 'It's because the play transports you!'" The question of what audiences will actually take from this production—whether they'll see a political statement, a psychological thriller, or something else entirely—remains open.