The Standard of Living ★★★★ Theatre Royal Haymarket | Sep 21 - Dec 12, 2026

In 1849, Thomas Carlyle dismissed political economy as the “dismal science”. James Graham’s new play about John Maynard Keynes would seem to prove him spectacularly wrong. Part biography, part intellectual sparring match, it examines one of the twentieth century’s most influential economists and, in doing so, reveals a man as full of apparent contradictions as the economic theories that made him famous. A member of the Bloomsbury group, Keynes moved among writers, artists and intellectuals such as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. However, he seemed slightly out of place in this unconventional milieu, as he also worked at the Treasury and frequented the meeting rooms of Westminster. Bohemian and bureaucrat in equal proportions. His private life was no less contradictory: while methodically recording his same-sex encounters with the obsessiveness of a stamp collector, he later married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, an unlikely union that proved remarkably successful. And it seems Lopokova came to express the imaginative and transgressive dimension of Keynes that sat alongside his rational, methodical public persona. In The Standard of Living, Graham does not attempt to tidy up these contradictions or provide a neat psychological explanation for them. Instead, he places them alongside one another and lets the audience work out the relationship between them. That can be stimulating, but it can also leave the play feeling less integrated than it might be. How do Keynes’s Bloomsbury friendships, his unconventional personal life and his battles over economic theory fit together? The narrative does not always provide the missing link. Another challenge for the audience is familiarity with the characters in the play. Knowing something about the famed members of the Bloomsbury group and having some knowledge of the intellectual world in which Keynes operated may not be requisite, but it certainly helps. The more one brings to this play, the more one is likely to take from it. For those coming to The Standard of Living without that background, some of the personal and social dynamics might remain opaque. Ultimately, however, it is not Keynes’s private life that proves the most compelling aspect of this work. The real dramatic energy lies in his battles with fellow economists, particularly Friedrich Hayek, as competing theories collide over the future of the economy. Here Graham finds his richest material. Keynes’s argument that government spending could help pull an economy out of depression challenged prevailing economic orthodoxy, while his belief that investment in the arts could be economically productive was equally provocative. The debates are effectively battles over the balance sheet of society itself: what should governments spend, what should they save, and what happens when an economy refuses to find equilibrium? The ingenuity of the work is that Keynes’s personal contradictions echo those intellectual ones. The man who combined academic respectability with sexual unconventionality also advocated economic ideas that appeared radical while defending them with the confidence of an establishment insider. The result is not a portrait of a tidy theorist but of a man who seems almost incapable of fitting neatly into the categories he moves between. In his characterisation of Keynes, Rory Kinnear gives an award-worthy performance, bringing a restless intelligence and impenetrable self-possession to the economist while conveying his curious incongruities, incalculable assurance and complex contradictions. Kinnear manages to make the economist’s arguments theatrically engaging without turning him into a mere mouthpiece for economic theory. The focus remains on both the man advancing the ideas and the ideas themselves. The performance provides the play with a strong centre of gravity, around which its shifting personal and intellectual relationships can orbit. In the end, Graham makes a persuasive case that economics is rich territory for drama, and Keynes becomes fascinating precisely because he resists simple explanation. While the play may not always neatly weave its different strands together, its central figure and his ideas make for an absorbing evening in the theatre. Carlyle may have called it the “dismal science,” but Graham finds in Keynes a world of intellectual conflict, personal contradiction and theatrical possibility.

Rated: ★★★★

Reviewed by J.C.

Photo by Manuel Harlan

When, Where, Getting there:

• Sep 21 - Dec 12, 2026
• Mon - Wed: 7 pm, Thu - Sat: 7:30 pm, Thu & Sat: 2:30
• Theatre Royal Haymarket
• Nearest tube: Piccadilly Circus
• https://trh.co.uk/whatson/the-standard-of-living/