L-R: Luke Cinque White and Rory Kinnear in The Standard of Living. Photo: Manuel Harlan
Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1Y until 12 December
James Graham’s delightful new play about the economist John Maynard Keynes opens with a knowing joke. “I have no doubt that some of you will feel daunted by this subject matter,” says Keynes (Rory Kinnear) as he workshops a lecture. His lover Duncan Grant (Thomas Flynn) scoffs at his dense graphs and equations and asks him what really matters to him. Keynes answers with a question: “What is a good life?” And we’re off.
The implausibly prolific Graham has many strings to his bow but he is uniquely good at wrangling social history and complex ideas into lively drama: the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun in Ink (now a Danny Boyle film) or the 1970s Labour governments in his 2012 breakthrough This House. This time he’s playing on the highest difficulty setting, covering Keynes’s life from the outbreak of war in 1914 to his death in 1946 while explaining concepts such as the multiplier effect. How do he and director Nicholas Hytner make it so much fun?
Keynes certainly lived a good life, and one that made him one of the titans of the 20th century. He didn’t just reinvent economics but saved the UK from postwar bankruptcy, co-founded the IMF and World Bank, and made possible the NHS and the welfare state. Just as importantly, to him, he originated the Arts Council and built the Cambridge Arts Theatre. The play’s merchandise calls him “the Great Persuader”, a title he earned by being a unicorn combination of pragmatist and dreamer.
Kinnear is not only more handsome than the real Keynes (whom Virginia Woolf compared to a “gorged seal”) but a lot more humble. Still, he brings to life a man who absolutely refused to stay in his lane. Keynes is torn between two worlds that he alone believes shouldn’t be separate: the realm of art and the kingdom of money. Costume designer Jenny Beavan outfits the largely anonymous ministers and Treasury officials in grey suits while his friends in the Bloomsbury Group – whose bohemian bubble was kept afloat by Keynes’s stock-market speculations even as they scolded him for selling out – are warm and colourful. Designer Bob Crowley’s sliding panels heighten the contrast with projections of vivid modernist paintings for the Bloomsbury scenes and black-and-white archival photographs to evoke the brutal tides of history.
The cast of The Standard of Living. Photo: Manuel Harlan
It is the dance of ideas that gives the play its energy, comedy and soul, like a friendlier version of Tom Stoppard
Keynes was also sexually unpredictable. After numerous liaisons with men (meticulously documented in his journal), he shocked his friends by marrying the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925. “Maynard, that’s a woman!” exclaims Woolf, spikily played by Naomi Frederick. The charismatic Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova doesn’t have much to chew on with Lydia, but her dreamlike dance sequences give the play a second language to express movement, change and the quest for harmony.
Now, you might complain that Keynes’s life lacks dramatic tension. While he had to fight to get his heretical theories a hearing, this well-liked serial overachiever, the cleverest man in any room, was not a tortured, tragic figure. Nor does he lend himself to the same second-act rug-pull as Ink or Brexit: The Uncivil War, where the insurgent becomes the destroyer. He was a good man in a good marriage with good ideas. It is the dance of ideas that gives the play its energy, comedy and soul, like a friendlier version of Tom Stoppard.
Whereas Tim Price’s hagiographic Nye made every one of Nye Bevan’s opponents a dullard or a swine, The Standard of Living gives Keynes’s antagonists their due. His Bloomsbury frenemy Lytton Strachey (Pip Carter, hilariously bitter) is the voice of art for art’s sake: “If only people didn’t want things!” Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston), the monomaniacal father of neoliberalism, is just as intelligent as Keynes and as emotionally scarred by hyperinflation as his opponent is by mass unemployment. Both Hayek and Strachey are partisans who see Keynes’s unifying third way as a dangerous misreading of how the world should be.
Rory Kinnear and Natalia Osipova in The Standard of Living. Photo: Manuel Harlan
Keynes versus Hayek in act two is Graham at his best, turning an intellectual debate into a zippy duel. “We must tighten our belts,” demands Hayek. “Buy a new belt!” replies Keynes. They go head to head on the roof of King’s College, Cambridge, when they are fire wardens during the blitz. “People will look back on this and never believe that it actually happened,” says Keynes, but it really did; while Graham smudges the chronology in places, his research is faultless.
Graham makes a few topical points, about arts funding or the toxic remedies of populism, but what he’s really championing is a view of life. For Keynes, economics was not primarily about numbers and systems but people. His famous quip “In the long run we are all dead” was his rebuke to the laissez-faire argument that the market would eventually correct itself and human suffering in the meantime was inevitable.
The play ends with Kinnear delivering a soaring, humanist peroration to the fullness of life which ties Keynes’s call for state intervention to a broader rejection of passivity in every sphere of life. To laissez-faire (“leave it be”), he responds: “Just do it. Don’t wait.” It depends how you feel about subtext becoming text, but I found it beautiful and apt. Whereas Hayek snaps “economics is not poetry!”, Keynes thought it could be, and so does Graham. Both contend that life does not take place in separate boxes but in the interplay of work and pleasure, politics and friendship, the large and the small. Only connect.
Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story. His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize