John Maynard Keynes, the renowned economist, is the subject of a new play by James Graham titled The Standard of Living. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the play will open at the Haymarket in September and focuses on Keynes's life from 1917 until his death in 1946. During this period, he became the founding father of macroeconomics and reshaped government thinking on finance and the arts.
Rory Kinnear to Portray Keynes
Rory Kinnear will play Keynes, a figure Graham describes as embodying the "great struggle of an outsider and a disruptor whom people resisted for most of his life." Born in 1883, Keynes studied mathematics at Cambridge before turning to economics. After the Great Depression, he advocated for government intervention to stabilize the economy, arguing that governments should spend during economic hardship rather than waiting for markets to self-correct.
Keynes's Multifaceted Passions
Economics was only one of Keynes's interests. Hytner, who recently directed John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in Giant, called Keynes a "radical" who championed both economic reform and the arts. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Keynes lived openly as a bisexual man. The play will explore his relationships within the group, including his friendship with Virginia Woolf and his romance with painter Duncan Grant, described as the love of his life.
"It starts with him at odds with Bloomsbury," Hytner said, noting that many contemporaries disapproved of Keynes's high-level government involvement. "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."
Keynes's Enduring Legacy
Keynes's seminal work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, sought solutions to mass unemployment during the Great Depression. In 2017, it was voted the most influential academic text on British life. His principles underpinned an economic golden age in Britain, with GDP-per-head growth averaging 2.44% annually between 1950 and 1973, and provided intellectual support for Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the US.
Despite his relationships with men, Keynes married Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925. She will be played by Royal Ballet dancer Natalia Osipova. Keynes's sexuality drew criticism; in 2013, historian Niall Ferguson apologized for remarks suggesting Keynes didn't care about future generations because he was childless and gay. In fact, Lopokova had miscarried.
Relevance Today
Graham and Hytner believe Keynes's ideas remain relevant. "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." The play also features Keynes's intellectual rival Friedrich Hayek, who called Keynes "the only really great man I ever knew."
