British playwright James Graham, known for plays about Rupert Murdoch and the England national football team under Gareth Southgate, now turns to one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century: John Maynard Keynes. His new work ‘The Standard of Living’ illuminates Keynes’s life from 1917 to his death in 1946 – an era in which he became the founding father of macroeconomics and fundamentally reshaped government thinking on finance and the role of the arts.
Nicholas Hytner, who most recently directed John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in ‘Giant’, takes the helm. Rory Kinnear plays the lead role of John Maynard Keynes. Hytner described Keynes as a ‘radical’ who not only championed economic reform but also passionately advocated for the arts. According to Graham, the play tells of ‘the great struggle of an outsider and troublemaker, whom most people resisted throughout his life’.
Keynes, born in 1883, studied mathematics at Cambridge before switching to economics. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, he developed a method for governments to protect citizens from the ‘malfunctions of capitalism’. He argued that state intervention was essential to stabilise the economy and that the government must spend money during economic downturns rather than waiting for markets to self-correct.
The play also touches on Keynes’s relationships within the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of bohemians, writers and artists that included Virginia Woolf and the painter Duncan Grant – whom Graham describes as the great love of Keynes’s life. Keynes lived openly as bisexual. ‘The Standard of Living’ will premiere at the Haymarket Theatre in London in September.
Source: www.theguardian.com
