The Standard of Living: James Graham’s joyfully Stoppardian play about Keynes

“Many of you are feeling daunted by this subject matter…” So says Rory Kinnear’s John Maynard Keynes at the start of James Graham’s joyfully Stoppardian if overstuffed new play about economics, art, sexuality and how to live a good life. Crunching complex 20th century financial theories and Bloomsbury aesthetics in a way that speak to Britain today, it features a lot of exposition and narrative shortcuts. (“This report, Beveridge… I don’t know what to say.”)

But I loved the sweep and brio of it, the epigrammatic wit and the zing of ideas, the compassion and love of human life that underpins a play that’s about worth not value. Nicholas Hytner’s sparely staged production features a stealthily compelling central performance from Kinnear as Keynes, magnetic though socially awkward and stiffly academic. Former Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova reveals ravishing comic timing - as well as faultless turns and leaps in dance interludes - as Lydia Lopokova, the Russian ballerina he improbably married.

Keynes radically proposed that the UK government should borrow and invest in both its own populace and defeated nations after both world wars rather than scrimp and punish (I’m simplifying, because I am an economic imbecile). This seemingly dry-as-dust moneyman also befriended and bankrolled Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Vanessa and Clive Bell et al, sleeping with most of the male members of their artistic circle, along with every sailor, gardener or diplomat who caught his eye: he even “had a bit of a flirt” with Einstein.

Graham puts the establishment of the welfare state, the NHS and the Arts Council broadly down to Keynes: also Britain’s post-WWII dependence on America. Never one to present only one side of an argument, he sets him up against his admirer turned rival, the Austrian libertarian Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston), Margaret Thatcher’s favoured economist. The debate over whether the state or the market should steer capitalism still rages today, but the play is about much more than this.

Rory Kinnear and the ensemble cast in The Standard of Living

Manuel Harlan

Chiefly it’s about delight and imagination. Keynes learns from fey, glamorous painter Duncan Grant (Thomas Flynn) how to present his ideas as stories that will involve and enthral. Relegated to Cambridge after criticising his masters in government, he builds the Cambridge Arts Theatre solely so that Osipova can move – unwisely, it turns out - from dance into acting. When war breaks out again, he and Hayek both end up as fire-watchers on the roof of King’s College, their friendship and their great battle of ideas potentially to be vaporised by an incendiary.

You can sense Graham’s glee on discovering that nugget, just as you can revel in his portrayal of the feckless Bloomsburyites. Keynes’s personal largesse enabled them to produce great art but they bit the hand that fed them and were crashing, petit-bourgeois snobs when confronted by genuine free-thinkers. Not just Lopokova, but Keynes himself, it’s implied.

The dialogue is both deftly intelligent and blissfully funny, hence the comparison with Stoppard. “We must tighten our belts!” says Hayek. “Buy a new belt!” ripostes Keynes, succinctly distilling their worldviews. Emboldened as he proposes to end 200 years of laissez-faire policy, Keynes suggests: “Why not pull down the whole of south London. Who would miss it?” This is a great throwaway gag in a London theatre, made sweeter by the fact that, the last time I checked, both Graham and Kinnear lived near me in Kennington.

Hytner directs with his customary felicity, and Bob Crowley supplies a set of dangling oblong panels onto which street scenes and paintings are projected. These neatly recall the aphorism that the Bloomsbury group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”. The dance sequences express the pure pleasure of making and witnessing art.

Here, as in many recent openings, performers weren’t entirely sure of their words on opening night. Straitened finances across the board are clearly eating into rehearsal times. Graham’s Keynes makes the case for investing in the health and wellbeing of humans, and in “culture as a public good”. Amen to that.