Writer: James Graham
Director: Nicholas Hytner
Living a good life on your own terms takes writer James Graham in three slightly separate directions in his new play The Standard of Living, opening at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. With the economist John Maynard Keynes as his subject, it compares governmental economic models, explores the space between mathematical and creative careers, and pushes into questions of who we love and why. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the pieces can’t quite hold its strands together as Graham attempts a slightly different approach.
John Maynard Keynes’ economic theories are frequently rejected by the UK government for most of the early twentieth century despite his years of work for the Treasury, meeting his future nemesis, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, as they debate models for improving recession. Meanwhile, friend to the Bloomsbury Group artists, Keynes both funds and promotes their art and literature, certain that access to culture is essential for a good life. When the hitherto homosexual Keynes meets Lydia Lopokova, a Russian dancer with the Ballets Russes, his belief system is turned upside down.
One of the most important characteristics of Graham’s plays has been their structure, a strong architectural shape from which the narrative can hang but also draw its momentum. Sometimes that has been a numbers game with a time limit – Larry Lamb having to raise circulation numbers for The Sun within one year or the Labour government in This House needing enough MPs to keep its administration afloat – and sometimes by taking a fixed event and casting backwards to review the activities leading up to it, such as Charles Ingram’s Millionaire winning moment in Quiz offering a case for the Prosecution and then for the Defence, or William F. Buckley’s homophobic outburst during the debates with Gore Vidal in Best of Enemies.
The Standard of Living has no similar framework beyond a single posed question, the substance of ‘a good life ’, and suffers as a result, placing too much emphasis on tangential scenes and missing opportunities to expand on the ones that really fly. It is a problem that Tim Price also experienced with Nye at the National Theatre in 2024, ostensibly about the founding of the NHS; the play forgot to tell the audience about that and instead became a meandering biography. And Graham’s mini-biography of Keynes could more fully analyse his lasting effects.
No other contemporary playwright has delivered such a consistently insightful and significant body of work in the last 15 years, significant because it uses historical settings to examine how we live now, explicating the mechanisms, decisions and tides in the affairs of men that shape the society we have today. The Standard of Living stops short of that, telling us little beyond the flip-flopping between two economic models. It may be a commercial theatre pressure to play down the complex financial discussions in favour of bitchy chat among the snobbish privilege of the Bloomsbury Group, but the play is the poorer for it.
In fact, these characters should have been nothing more than incidental cameos in a story centred on Keynes, between the two loves of his life – one the economic debate with Hayek over whether to spend or save in the downtimes, the other his burgeoning love for Lydia after decades of homosexuality. The strength in this approach would reinforce the major dichotomies of Keynes’ life, for and against, work or love, as well as all the places where they overlap, telling us something more about Keynes’ influence and impacts on the current state of the nation.
And while this balance of the play’s three strands feels lopsided, it offers up no new information about the Bloomsbury Group characters who speak in sometimes awkward exposition. Many audience members may be hard-pressed to name anyone other than Virginia Woolf; thus, the potted history of their many sexual entanglements, along with their introductions as “the greatest artist of the age” describing Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell as “the great pioneer of modernist painting” or “foremost art critic Clive Bell” feel awkward, as though anyone would describe themselves in such terms. Yet, there is no sense of why Keynes continued to provide financial support when they behaved so badly to him, appearing only to tolerate him and later his wife. They are an element in Keynes’ life but consume oxygen in a play that really has little need of them when Hayek and Lydia offer far greater dramatic possibility.
Act Two fares better as Keynes finally interacts at length with the excellent Laurie Kynaston’s Austrian economist Hayek and, like Best of Enemies, offers two contrasting points of view on economic policies that could have provided an alternative structure for the play. Here the action begins to ascend as Kynaston and Rory Kinnear’s charismatic Keynes interact in much longer scenes, battling ideas and their two economic traditions, as political, military and collaborative failures dog European countries across the century. Giving these characters more time to debate in public and private would offer more insight into Hayek as Keynes’ relief, leading to a more substantial story about the grounding of our economic system.
Likewise, the relationship with Lydia is one of the major turning points in Keynes’ life, awakening the playwright’s interest in the mysteries of the heart, a theme which runs through the play. Setting aside the cruder questions of what they do in bed, there is scope here too for a far deeper examination of how and why they came to love each other, what was it that brought them together, and how Keynes overcomes his reservations. Natalia Osipova is magnificent, her acting performance bringing an energy and sharp certainty that other characters lack as she pleasingly cuts through the Bloomsbury Group nonsense, developing an emotional connection that is about accepting and giving real love. This could tell us far more about Keynes than any number of bitter duologues with Lytton Strachey.
Nicholas Hytner has lots of excellent qualities as a director, but editing is not one of them, and the show would have benefited from a keener directorial eye to focus on the core narrative and find the dynamic drive. Hytner’s staging, though, is hugely entertaining on the whole, with large moveable flies designed by Bob Crowley onto which are projected Bloomsbury Group art as well as photojournalism from the eras as scenes switch between the artists and the economists/politicians, although there are moments when Kinnear’s Keynes is lost in an empty and unforgiving expanse.
There are plenty of great ideas here along with some Easter Eggs for Graham fans – a brilliant scene between Keynes and Hayek staged as a debate-dance echoes tangoed international relations in Eden’s Empire, a mention of Albert Einstein nods to Graham’s early work Albert’s Boy (a revival tours next year), while economist Adam Smith is referenced from last year’s Make it Happen. But what you want from a James Graham play is to leave the theatre seeing ourselves more clearly than we did before. The Standard of Living has good intentions but doesn’t heed its own final call to ‘act.’
Runs until 12 December 2026
