Will the New Stage Version of The Lives of Others Tell the Truth?

    The Lives of Others is going to be a play. Starting October 10, Keira Knightley (Black Doves), Stephen Dillane (Game of Thrones) and Luke Thompson (Bridgerton) will star in a London stage adaptation of the Oscar-winning German movie. Robert Icke adapts and directs Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Academy Award-winning 2007 film about a writer and an actor who are placed under state surveillance.

    As regular readers of Hot Air also know, The Lives of Others – the movie, not the play — is going to be the centerpiece film in the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival, which will be held October 1-4 at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C.

    I do have small doubts about the stage version of The Lives of Others. It is often the case that when Hollywood types take on anti-communist material, there was the recent disaster of the “reimagining” of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. British historian Rafe Heydel-Mankoo was blunt: “Animal Farm as imagined by woke Hollywood is as appalling as you might imagine. The objectionable Americanization aside, this cringeworthy trailer suggests a complete perversion of the book. A critique of Stalinist Russia, the betrayal of revolutionary ideals, and how ideological regimes can devolve into totalitarianism appears to have been turned into a — sadly predictable — attack on capitalism. Bizarre and depressing. But what can one expect from a progressive Hollywood that openly embraces socialism? Animal Farm’s themes and warnings have arguably never been more pertinent to the West than today.”

    Sonia Friedman, the producer of the British version of The Lives of Others, said this in a statement: “I’ve been obsessed with The Lives of Others ever since I first saw it—Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s exquisite, haunting, and completely masterful film, and there is no one better than Robert Icke to bring this to life onstage. He has this rare ability to combine huge ideas with real emotional truth, and I know he and the company will find a way to realize it that feels both unexpected and completely thrilling. 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.”

    Taking characters and themes to “places the film didn’t” and then “finding your theatrical language” is a red flag. It usually means taking something precise and beautiful and making it ambiguous and woke. It’s just a step away from there’s no difference between the East German Stasi and American evangelicals — or, of course, Trump. If anyone can destroy the original story with that leap, it’s a bunch of actors.

    The reason why The Lives of Others is so relevant today is that, more than Nazism or even Stalinism, it is exactly analogous to the way the left in America and other Western countries work not from the top down, dictating how people will live, think and feel (although they do this also), but through institutions that already exist and are even somewhat trusted in a culture — Hollywood, media, publishing. In his perceptive essay “East German Totalitarianism: A Warning from History,” historian Peter Grieder puts it this way:

According to Mary Fulbrook, the doyenne of GDR studies in the United Kingdom, totalitarianism theory entails adopting “an essentially dichotomous approach in separating cleanly between repressive, totalitarian ‘state’ and innocent, oppressed “society.” What she does not acknowledge, though, is that totalitarian polities rule through rather than over society. Totalitarianism is the invasion and occupation of society by the state—a state that has itself been hijacked by and subjugated to a political party. In the GDR’s case, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Such dictatorships embraced the “totality” of society, fusing it with party-state structures. Collaboration and participation were essential prerequisites for a system that, by definition, drew the entire population into its remit. As the anticommunist dissident and future president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, perceptively observed in 1978, the crucial “line of conflict” did not run between rulers and ruled but rather “de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her way” was “both a victim and a supporter of the system.” He drew attention to the way that every person was, to a greater or lesser degree, implicated in the regime: “Individuals … must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

    This is a perfect description of what is going on in America. When a liberal claims a man can become a woman, or dictates what people can watch and read, or tries to destroy someone without due process, and others passively accept this, they are all living within the lie. It is a slightly different system than the black-and-white dichotomy of top-down dictatorships. American elites, like the Stasi, work with artists, writers, poets, musicians, and comedians. If the producers and actors of the stage version of The Lives of Others understand this, it could be a great production. If they start flexing their theater kids’ muscles, watch out.

Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it’s spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there’s nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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