Learn about the fascinating real history behind 'The Standard of Living'

James Graham's exciting new West End play centres on rebel economist John Maynard Keynes and his relationships with artist Duncan Grant and ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

Summary

• James Graham's new play The Standard of Living is premiering in the West End
• The show stars Rory Kinnear as famous economist John Maynard Keynes
• Natalia Osipova plays his Russian ballerina wife
• The play also features Bloomsbury Group icons like Duncan Grant and Virginia Woolf

A new play from James Graham is always an event. The Olivier Award winner has given us numerous incredible stage shows and TV series inspired by real life, such as Dear England, Punch, Sherwood, and Quiz. Now he turns his attention to the famous rebel economist John Maynard Keynes in The Standard of Living.

The production, which has its world premiere at the Theatre Royal Haymarket this autumn, stars Rory Kinnear (Othello, Skyfall) as Keynes alongside Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova making her West End debut. The play is directed by award-winning Nicholas Hytner (Giant, The History Boys. One Man, Two Guvnors). Get to know all about the real people dramatised in the show ahead of your trip.

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

Who was John Maynard Keynes?

Born in 1883 to impressive middle-class parents – his father was an economist and lecturer at Cambridge University, his mother became the town’s second-ever female mayor – Keynes was an exceptionally bright pupil who won a scholarship to Eton and then another to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics.

After a brief stint in the civil service, which he found dull, he became a fellow at King’s and began a serious study of economics. He advised David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, during the First World War, and aided the Treasury with negotiating credit from Britain’s international allies. He attended the 1919 Versailles peace conference and argued – to no avail – that Germany’s compensation payments should not be set too high, thus hurting both that nation’s and the world economy.

Keynes went on to publish several books, including his seminal 1936 work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. He was critical of governments introducing austerity measures during recessions (like the Great Depression) and simply waiting for the market to readjust, rather than taking active steps to get the economy moving and people back in work through interventionist public spending. That hugely influenced world leaders like American President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Standard of Living sounds like it will take place during this febrile period in the 20th century, as markets are crashing and there are crucial discussions about the future direction of travel for Britain and other countries. Can Keynes’s radical thinking help to reshape the world?

Keynes’s colourful personal life

The Standard of Living will dig into Keynes the man as well as the legendary economist, contrasting his experience in lofty (but essential conservative) political circles with his far more bohemian and unconventional relationships. That should make for a gripping drama, not just illustrating Keynes’s theories about how we should live, but showing what that actually meant for him in deeply personal terms.

Notably, Keynes’s early romantic relationships, at school and university, were with men – including Dilly Knox (later a brilliant code-breaker) and Daniel De Mendi Macmillan, brother of future Prime Minister Harold. Keynes then found warm acceptance in the famously open-minded, sexually experimental Bloomsbury Group: the intellectual collective that featured luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey.

Keynes had a passionate relationship with a fellow Bloomsbury Group member, Scottish artist Duncan Grant, though Grant went on to cohabitate and have a child with Bell. Both Grant and Keynes also had affairs with Strachey, further complicating this tangled web.

Keynes then surprised his Bloomsbury community by beginning to pursue affairs with women, suggesting that he was in fact bisexual. In 1921 he fell for the great Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, who was a star in the revered Ballets Russes. The unlikely couple wed in 1925 (with Grant as Keynes’s best man!) and went on to have a happy marriage, although they were unable to have children.

While the rather snobbish Bloomsbury crew were initially hostile to Lopokova, she and Keynes became great cultural supporters, including of the Cambridge Arts Theatre, the Royal Opera House, and what would become the Royal Ballet. Keynes also played a key role in establishing the Arts Council: he was its founding chairman. With Osipova co-starring in The Standard of Living, we should get to see plenty of this fascinating union – and almost certainly glimpse the remarkable dancer in action.

Who will appear in the play?

As well as Keynes (Kinnear) and Lopokova (Osipova), The Standard of Living features numerous other iconic figures in Keynes’s circle. These include his lover Duncan Grant (played by Thomas Flynn), Strachey (Pip Carter), Woolf (Naomi Frederick), Bell (Claire Price), and painter Dora Carrington (Agatha Enecio), as well as Keynes’s big economic rival Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston) and his colleague – with whom he also sometimes fiercely disagreed – economist William Beveridge (George Taylor).

That extraordinary collection of characters should show us both sides of Keynes, and how one perhaps influenced the other: Keynes the bohemian and sexual pioneer, surrounded by artists, and Keynes the economic powerhouse who had the ear of world leaders. Theatre is a fantastic medium for this portrait of a towering figure, dramatising his revolutionary ideas through vivid relationships, illustrating the contradictions within Keynes, and immersing us in this incredibly exciting period of modern history.

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

Main photo credit: The Standard of Living artwork. Inset: Cast members Laurie Kynaston, Natalia Osipova, Rory Kinnear and Thomas Flynn (Photos courtesy of the production)