Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others London

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The Lives of Others puts a secret police officer in an attic above the flat he is bugging, listening to a playwright and an actress for evidence of disloyalty, and finding instead a life he has no idea how to live himself. Wiesler is good at his job, which means he is good at breaking people. The couple below him are watched around the clock: their conversations, their friends, their arguments, their work. As the tapes accumulate, so does something the file has no category for, and the officer begins to shade his reports. What starts as procedure becomes a slow, deliberate act of protection that could destroy him. The play comes from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 film, which he wrote and directed, and which he has now adapted for the stage, with Robert Icke directing and original music by Max Richter. The move suits the material: a story about listening, performed in a room where an audience is doing exactly that. The tension is quiet rather than loud. Almost nothing is shouted. The danger sits in what gets written down, who is standing in the corridor, and which sentence is repeated back weeks later. Surveillance becomes intimacy of the worst kind, and the question of whether a person can be reached through the very machinery built to break them stays open a long time. It is for anyone drawn to moral pressure applied slowly, and to the idea that decency can surface in the least likely place. Performed live, with the listener and the listened-to sharing a single stage, the eavesdropping becomes impossible to look away from.