If chancellor John Healey is looking to escape unwanted advice before his first budget, he had better steer clear of James Graham’s ambitious new play. Its hero is John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, played here by Rory Kinnear with all the charisma that British reserve can muster, who argued that economic policy should be interventionist in order to stave of recession and, more radically still, boost the happiness of the population.
Also present and making her West End debut is principal Royal Ballet ballerina Natalia Osipova, the Russian-Jewish superstar who here takes on the role of Lydia Lopokova, the Russian ballerina who, surprisingly to Keynes’s Bloomsbury Set friends formed a relationship with the hitherto gay economist and went on to marry him.
This is a work where the dramatic conflict is not between people but ideas. In one corner there is Keynes and his call for humans to influence their destiny. In the other is the “laissez-faire” (leave well alone) economic theory that says the financial life of a country is a self-culling and self-generating cycle, a position represented by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston).
Set largely between the wars, the two figures passionately and politely oppose each other at the Treasury, in public meetings, in the pages of their books and even as air raid wardens on the roof of Cambridge University’s Clare College.
As we have come to expect with Graham, our greatest state-of-the-nation playwright, the arguments are thrillingly articulate. Colour in the context of drab Britain is literally added by the presence of the Bloomsbury Set’s group of transgressive artists and writers – Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant among them – who have adopted the stuffier, but no less anti-establishment Keynes into their group.
In the scenes set in the group’s Charleston hangout in Sussex, designer Bob Crowley’s panels glide across the stage with Bell’s and Grant’s post-impressionist paintings projected onto them, including Grant’s shimmering portrait of Keynes in the woolly hat that Kinnear’s version wears on stage.
Scene changes are gilded by Osipova’s dancing. The ballerina becomes more central to the play as her diva-ish Lopokova grows the emotional rock in Keynes’s life, especially as his ideas are rejected. It is role in which Osipova, who we assume has a fair amount in common with her character, convinces.
Yet the conflict of economic theory never – and surely never can – achieve the hair-raising drama of, say, Hytner’s previous production Giant, the hit Mark Rosenblatt play that excavated Roald Dahl’s antisemitism. The exchanges are never less than interesting but although the quality of life for millions of people is at stake the personal stakes for the privileged and talented protagonists generates hardly any tension.
Still, the evening is a classy, enriching reminder of Keynes’s contribution to the life of this country. Whether this is enough to pull in audiences in this harsh economic environment of the West End is a leap of faith of which Keynes would approve. I just hope the people agree.
The Standard of Living
Theatre Royal
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