EXCLUSIVE: Keira Knightley (Black Doves), Stephen Dillane (Game of Thrones) and Luke Thompson (Bridgerton) will star this fall in a London stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning German movie The Lives of Others, a love story sublimely wrapped in a psychological surveillance thriller set in Stasi-controlled 1984 East Berlin.

Broadway and West End producer Sonia Friedman confirmed the news to Deadline during an exclusive interview.

Robert Icke, who was represented on Broadway this season with his blistering dramatization of Oedipus with Lesley Manville and Mark Strong, will direct the new work. He has collaborated closely with The Lives of Others film director and writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on the play that will begin its world-premiere run at London’s Adelphi Theatre from October 14 through January 9, 2027.

Tickets are on sale from 9 a.m. UK time today, with 25% of seats during the limited season available for between $39-$47, which is good news considering the way West End ticket prices in some instances are beginning to resemble exorbitant prices charged on Broadway!

The picture won the 2007 Best International Film Oscar. Friedman says she’s been “obsessed” with the story ever since.

It’s a potent tale about a playwright, Georg Dreyman (played by Thompson), his actress-girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Knightley) and Gerd Wiesler (Dillane), a master Stasi interrogator instructed to bug — every which way — the couple’s apartment. In the movie, the roles were played by Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck and Ulrich Mühe, respectively.

Friedman notes that Donnersmarck’s being “incredibly respectful” and “very much encouraging Rob and his team and me to sort of find our own voice within it.” She stresses that Donnersmarck “doesn’t want us to do a faithful screen-to-stage adaptation. He’s not remotely interested in that, and neither are we.

“What we’re interested in is taking the characters and the heart of the story and the themes, and then finding our theatrical language. And what’s exciting, is that he wants us to keep digging into the story and go as deep as we can, and take it to places that perhaps the film couldn’t just in terms of how we theatrically manifest the literal surveillance,” Friedman explains.

Knightley and Icke are friends. When he mentioned the project to her last year, she was sent a script “and she read it and within 24 hours she was in,” Friedman reports.

“It’s a remarkable role for her. And she’s not been on stage for a very long time in London,” says Friedman, noting that the last time Knightley trod the boards in London was in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, with Ellen Burstyn, Elisabeth Moss, Carol Kane and Tobias Menzies, back in 2011 directed by Ian Rickson. It was produced, as it happens, by Friedman.

However, the last time Knightley took a curtain call at all was when she debuted on Broadway in an adaptation of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin at Studio 54 a decade ago.

The actress does seem to favour works that deal with the secretive intelligence world and injustice. For instance, films such as Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, The Imitation Game, Official Secrets and the Netflix drama Black Doves appear in her file.

Friedman jokes that when she and the show’s creatives discussed the casting of Wiesler, “you go, ‘Well, who we need is someone like Stephen Dillane. Okay, let’s ask Stephen Dillane!’ ”

The actor’s known to be, Friedman attests, “very choosy in the work he does and so it’s a personal sort of thrill to be working with him because I think he’s a genius. And Rob and I are just absolutely cock-a-hoop that he responded to the piece.”

Dillane’s probably best known for his ruthless Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones and for his perfectly pitched performances in Darkest Hour, The Tunnel and Sherwood. But he cut his teeth on the stage where he’s been at ease in Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, Ibsen and of course Stoppard, where one of his greatest triumphs was playing opposite Jennifer Ethel in The Real Thing in London. They then transferred to Broadway where both won Tony Awards.

Thompson’s known for playing Benedict in Bridgerton but knows his way on the boards having appeared at Shakespeare’s Globe three times; played the Almedia Theatre twice; and starred with James Norton, Omari Douglas and Zubin Varla in Ivo van Hove’s scorching stage adaptation of Hannah Yanagihara’s A Little Life. He was a fine Edgar opposite Ian McKellen and Sinead Cusack in King Lear, and he led the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2024 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Lives of Others film has become a classic; one of those movies that rewards in revisiting it.

With a sense of alarm in her voice, Friedman notes that even though it’s set in the 1980s, its story of invading, actually more like penetrating, private lives is totally pertinent now that we live in a chilling age of extensive CCTV coverage of our everyday movements in public and the intrusive monitoring of our every keystroke on our electronic devices. 

“It’s become more and more powerful and resonant, and dare I even say it, relevant about surveillance,” Friedman argues.

“And how fragile our freedoms are and how easily our freedoms can be eroded without us even noticing,” she adds with concern. 

“And all the themes and the ideas within it, even though they’re very specifically set, are very universal and right now feel incredibly poignant,” Friedman observes.

The combination of surveillance and love makes for “such an unlikely love story,” Friedman says. “And the love story as in the relationship between Weisler, who’s watching them and listening, and through their love, he finds compassion. And so it’s a devastating love story. And at the heart of it, I think it’s about kindness. He finds his kindness through an unbearable situation.”

The producer behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and current West End smash hit Paddington: The Musical says that her connection with the material stretches back 15 years to when Donnersmarck approached the late Tom Stoppard to see if the playwright would be interested in working with him on an adaptation of the film. “Tom very quickly said, ‘This isn’t for me,’ ” but he pointed the filmmaker in Friedman’s direction.

The producer finds the film “absolutely astonishing” and has long been a fan. Also, she notes, it has been “a sort of obsession of mine to find a theatrical form for it and a theatrical life,” and the introduction through Stoppard to Donnersmarck gave her the impetus to explore the idea of bringing it to the stage.

A few years ago she approached Icke to see if he might be keen. “He’s been so busy, and he turns so many things down, but he immediately responded to the story and the material and how incredibly theatrical it is,” Friedman recalls.

The reason for choosing the Adelphi, long known as a house for musicals, is because the play is both “so epic and deeply intimate,” Friedman says, while observing that Icke and designer Hildegard Bechtler and their teams “wanted the biggest theater we could find in order to really examine how our lives are sort of surveyed from all corners.”

She says that German-born Bechtler has been “very central to this” because she’s been “a huge driving force to this happening because it’s an incredibly important film for her and I think for so many Germans, as well as cinephiles and anybody who loves great storytelling.”

Lighting design is by Jon Clark, sound design by Giles Thomas, and the acclaimed Max Richter has been charged with composing a score that’s an integral part of the plot.