James Graham's new play, The Standard of Living, reimagines the life of John Maynard Keynes, focusing on his impact from 1917 to 1946. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the play features Rory Kinnear as Keynes and explores his role as a disruptor in economics and the arts.
Key points
James Graham's new play is titled The Standard of Living.
The play explores John Maynard Keynes's life and influence.
It is directed by Nicholas Hytner.
Rory Kinnear portrays Keynes.
The play opens at the Haymarket in September.
Mentioned in this story
John Maynard KeynesJames GrahamNicholas HytnerRory Kinnear
After exploring the rise of Rupert Murdoch and the emergence of Gareth Southgate’s England team, James Graham has turned his attention to one of the most important political figures of the 20th century: John Maynard Keynes.
His new play, The Standard of Living, directed by Nicholas Hytner and opening at the Haymarket in September, focuses on Keynes’s life from 1917 until his death in 1946 – a period in which he became the founding father of macroeconomics and reshaped government thinking on finance and the role of the arts.
Rory Kinnear will play Keynes, a man whose story, according to Graham, is about the “great struggle of an outsider and a disruptor whom people resisted for most of his life”.
Unemployed men receiving soup and slices of bread at an outdoor breadline during the Great Depression in Los Angeles, California. Some women serve the soup with large ladles while others hand out slices of bread from trays
Unemployed men receive soup and other food handouts at a breadline during the Great Depression in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: American Stock Archive/Getty
Born in 1883, Keynes studied maths at Cambridge before turning to economics. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, he designed a method for governments to protect citizens from the “dysfunction of capitalism”.
He argued that government intervention was vital to stabilise the economy, and that they should spend during periods of economic hardship, rather than waiting for markets to balance themselves.
Economics was only one of Keynes’s passions. Hytner, who recently directed the Tony winner John Lithgow as , said Keynes was a “radical” who championed the arts as well as economic reform. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Keynes lived as an out bisexual man.
Q&A
What is the focus of the play The Standard of Living?
The play focuses on John Maynard Keynes's life from 1917 until his death in 1946, highlighting his influence on macroeconomics and government finance.
Who is directing The Standard of Living?
The play is directed by Nicholas Hytner.
When does The Standard of Living open?
The Standard of Living is set to open at the Haymarket in September.
Who plays John Maynard Keynes in the play?
Rory Kinnear plays the role of John Maynard Keynes in The Standard of Living.
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James Graham stands in front of a Tribeca festival sign
James Graham believes Keynes’s ideas about economics and society remain relevant. Photograph: Ron Adar/Shutterstock
Graham’s play will also explore Keynes’s relationships within the Bloomsbury circle, a group of bohemians, writers and artists that included his friend Virginia Woolf and the painter Duncan Grant, described as the love of his life.
“It starts with him at odds with Bloomsbury,” Hytner said, noting that many of Keynes’s contemporaries disapproved of his involvement at the highest levels of state.
“He’s running down from Whitehall every weekend to Charleston, and they are – by and large – opposed to his involvement in the Treasury and the war,” Hytner said.
The painter Duncan Grant with John Maynard Keynes in 1926.
The painter Duncan Grant with John Maynard Keynes in 1926. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images/Getty
“His outlook was very large shaped by artists. Those were the people who were most influential on him: painters, novelists, and critics.”
Graham said: “People who love the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell are often not aware that one of the most impactful people of the 20th century was also hanging around in the same house – upstairs, writing a book.”
In Britain, he’s remembered for being the brains behind an economic golden age: Keynesian principles were behind GDP-per-head growth that averaged 2.44% a year between 1950 and 1973. His ideas also provided the intellectual ballast that underpinned Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US.
Nicholas Hytner stands beside a tree
Nicholas Hytner: ‘The problems that we’re currently facing seem so intractable that we appear to be paralysed.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
Although Keynes had relationships with men, he surprised his friends and acquaintances when in 1925, at the age of 42, he married Lydia Lopokova, the Russian ballerina and star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His best man was Grant. In the The Standard of Living, she will be played by the Royal Ballet dancer Natalia Osipova.
Keynes’s sexuality made him the subject of criticism. In 2013, Niall Ferguson apologised for “stupid and tactless” remarks suggesting that the economist did not care about future generations because he was childless and gay. In fact, Lopokova had miscarried.
Graham confirmed that Virgina Woolf would appear in the play, alongside Keynes’s intellectual rival Friedrich Hayek, whom Keynes described as “the only really great man I ever knew”, despite disagreeing with the Austrian economist and philosopher on many principles.
Graham and Hytner believe Keynes’s ideas still resonate. “The problems that we’re currently facing seem so intractable that we appear to be paralysed,” Hytner said. “We appear not to be confident about our ability to take radical action. And he was nothing if not radical.”
