Learn about dancers who have become actors ahead of 'The Standard of Living'

Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova portrays 'Bloomsbury Ballerina' Lydia Lopokova in James Graham's new play The Standard of Living.

Summary

• The Standard of Living plays at Theatre Royal Haymarket from 21 September to 12 December 2026
• Rory Kinnear plays economist John Maynard Keynes
• The Royal Ballet's Natalia Osipova co-stars as his wife Lydia Lopokova
• Learn about other dancers who have performed in plays and musicals

Playing at Theatre Royal Haymarket from 21 September to 12 December, The Standard of Living is the new play from James Graham (Dear England, Punch, Ink), telling the stories of the economist John Maynard Keynes and his ballerina wife Lydia Lopokova. Rory Kinnear (Here We Are, Skyfall) stars as Keynes and Royal Ballet principal dancer Natalia Osipova makes her debut as a dramatic actress as Lopokova.

Osipova said: “It’s a fantastic honour to be making my West End debut in The Standard of Living with such an incredible line-up of creatives and performers. Lydia Lopokova was a pivotal figure in ballet history, bridging Diaghilev’s legendary Ballets Russes and the development of British ballet last century, and I can’t wait to explore her character.”

There is a precedent of ballet dancers also working as actors, including Lopokova herself. Read on to learn more about Lopokova, Osipova, and dancers as actors.

Book The Standard of Living tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

What is The Standard of Living about?

The play is about the rebel economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), a member of the exclusive Bloomsbury Group, who got married to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925. Filled with music, dance, desire and debate, the play explores what it means to live a good life. Rory Kinnear plays Keynes and Natalia Osipova makes her West End debut as Lopokova.

Who was Lydia Lopokova?

“Bloomsbury Ballerina” (as she has been dubbed by biographer Judith Mackrell) Lydia Lopokova (1891-1981) was a Saint Petersburg-born ballerina who started her career as a child sensation, dancing for the Tsar and his family. Three of her siblings became dancers, including her brother Fyodor Lopukhov, who was chief choreographer of the Mariinsky Ballet Theatre.

Lopokova’s joined the Ballets Russes in 1910, where she excelled in demi-caractère roles as well as classical parts. She danced with Vaslav Nijinsky and had a relationship with composer Igor Stravinsky. She met the British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1921 when she danced the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Princess in London. They married in 1925 after her first marriage was annulled due to her husband’s bigamy.

Lopokova experienced resistance and snobbery from Keynes’s high-minded friends in the Bloomsbury Group, a set of intellectuals and creatives that included novelist Virginia Woolf and her writer and publisher husband Leonard; painters Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister) and Duncan Grant; art critic Clive Bell, and biographer Lytton Strachey. Later, the novelist E.M. Foster commented, “How we all used to underestimate her."

However, Lopokova’s influence on the arts was considerable. She and Keynes established the Cambridge Arts Theatre together and she was involved in the Camargo Society, which led to the creation of the Vic-Wells ballet (later the Royal Ballet). Her final performance as a dancer was as Swanhilda in Coppélia for the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1933, after which she continued to appear on stage as an actress during the 1930s.

Lopokova nursed Keynes through many years of ill health and, after his death in 1946, she withdrew from public life and spent the next 35 years living privately in East Sussex. She died at the age of 89 in 1981.

The character of Rezia, the homesick wife of the shellshocked Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, was inspired by Lopokova. She was portrayed by the ballerina Lynn Seymour in Derek Jarman’s experimental film Wittgenstein. If you look at the “The Awakening of the Muses” mosaic in the National Gallery, she is the model for Terpsichore, the muse of music. In The Standard of Living, Lopokova is played by ballerina Natalia Osipova in her stage acting debut.

Who is Natalia Osipova?

One of the world’s most celebrated ballerinas, Natalia Osipova was born in 1986 and trained at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy. She joined the Bolshoi’s corps de ballet in 2004 and came to attention as Kitri in Don Quixote. She became a principal in 2010 but left a year later, citing artistic differences. She joined the Royal Ballet as a principal in 2013. She is known for her remarkable technique and extraordinary charisma and dramatic intensity.

Osipova’s signature roles include Giselle, Anastasia, and Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. She was the subject of the documentary film Force of Nature in 2019.

When she played Clarissa Dalloway and Virginia Woolf (very apt, if somewhat ironic) in Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works earlier this year, LondonTheatre.co.uk’s reviewer commented that as Mrs Dalloway, “Osipova is riveting throughout as she bustles between an unforgiving urban environment that pays her no heed and the haunted recesses of lived experience: the sad eyes near the finish say it all.” As Woolf, “Osipova [partnered] William Bracewell in a rending duo between an anxiously supportive husband and his anguished wife. The two seem movingly indissoluble in the most emotionally expressive passages of the evening. That is until such time as one of the two can carry on no longer and it’s left to the sea to take her away.”

Osipova will not be performing on 16, 21, 22, 26 October and 4 and 5 November due to performances in Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon at the Royal Opera House. Why not take the opportunity to see her in action as a ballerina and as an actress this autumn?

Book Manon tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Dancers who became actors

Lydia Lopokova herself performed as an actress in the 1930s after her retirement from dancing, even though she didn’t achieve the same level of success that she’d enjoyed as a dancer. Her roles included Nora in A Doll’s House, Helene Wangel in The Master Builder, and Olivia in Twelfth Night.

The Red Shoes, the most famous ballet film of all, starred Royal Ballet principal Moira Shearer as Vicky Page. After retiring from ballet in 1953, Shearer toured as Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, and spent 1955-56 at the Bristol Old Vic, where she played the title roles in Ondine and Major Barbara, Cordelia in King Lear, and Lydia Languish in The Rivals.

The multi-faceted Australian dancer, actor, director, and choreographer Robert Helpmann, who also appeared in The Red Shoes, is perhaps the dancer with the most illustrious classical theatrical career. He played Hamlet at the Old Vic and for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1940s, and his other roles included King John, Oberon, Shylock, and Richard III. He is probably best remembered for his terrifying turn as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!

Naturally, many dancers use their transferable skills in musical theatre. Adam Cooper, a former Royal Ballet principal who created the role of the Swan in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, is perhaps the best-known British ballet dancer to have carved out a successful career in musicals. He has said, “I trained in ballet but I always knew that musical theatre was my destiny.” Cooper made his debut in Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes and he has also starred in Singin’ in the Rain, Guys and Dolls, and A Chorus Line, as well as working as a director and choreographer.

Christopher Wheeldon’s stage adaptation of An American in Paris starred New York City Ballet’s Robbie Fairchild and the Royal Ballet’s Leanne Cope in the roles played on screen by Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron (a ballet dancer who was discovered by Hollywood). LondonTheatre.co.uk’s reviewer observed that they were “effortlessly assured singers and actors as well as brilliant dancers”.

And the New York City Ballet’s Tiler Peck has been involved with Stephen Flaherty’s and Lynn Ahrens’s musical Little Dancer, about the artist Edgar Degas and his model Marie van Goethem, for many years. The show received a fully staged one-off performance at Theatre Royal Drury Lane last summer – perhaps there’ll be a full run to come?

It isn’t only ballet dancers who have transitioned into theatre. From the ballroom and Latin world, siblings Kevin Clifton and Joanne Clifton have both pursued successful musical theatre careers after rising to fame as Strictly Come Dancing professionals. Kevin is currently touring in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and has also starred in Chicago, Singin’ in the Rain, and the play 2:22 A Ghost Story, while Joanne’s credits include Thoroughly Modern Millie, Shrek The Musical, and the comedy Fawlty Towers: The Play.

Fellow Strictly alumna Janette Manrara will be making her dramatic acting debut in new American play Affluenza at Riverside Studios in September.

Acting is an essential part of dance, just without words! Body language and physical expressiveness is imperative for all performance. We’re excited to see how Osipova, one of the most renowned dance-actresses of her generation, adjusts to the transition.

Book The Standard of Living tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Book Affluenza tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Rory Kinnear and Natalia Ospiova (Photos courtesy of the production). Inset: Osipova and Manrara.