Keira Knightley to star in The Lives of Others stage adaptation

Keira Knightley is set to return to London's West End in a new stage adaptation of the 2006 film The Lives of Others.

The Pirates of the Caribbean actress will star alongside Bridgerton's Luke Thompson and Game of Thrones actor Stephen Dillane in the adaptation of the Oscar-winning German film.

The movie, which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar, revolves around the covert audio surveillance of East Berlin residents by a senior operative for East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, in 1984.

Thompson will portray playwright Georg Dreyman, Knightley will play his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, and Dillane will inhabit the role of Gerd Wiesler, a master Stasi interrogator instructed to bug their apartment.

Producer Sonia Friedman told Deadline that theatre director Robert Icke mentioned the project to his friend Knightley last year. She was sent the script, and "she read it and within 24 hours she was in".

"It's a remarkable role for her. And she's not been on stage for a very long time in London," she added of the British actress, who last appeared on the London stage in The Children's Hour in 2011. She later starred in Thérèse Raquin on Broadway in 2015.

She explained that Icke has collaborated closely with the film's writer-director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who has been encouraging them to "find their own voice within it".

"(He) doesn't want us to do a faithful screen-to-stage adaptation. He's not remotely interested in that, and neither are we," she explained. "What we're interested in is taking the characters and the heart of the story and the themes, and then finding our theatrical language."

The show will have its world premiere at London's Adelphi Theatre on 29 October. Previews will begin on 14 October, and the run will conclude on 9 January 2027.