John Maynard Keynes (centre) at the UN international monetary and financial conference in New Hampshire, US, in July 1944. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty
From Bloomsbury to Whitehall: New Play Reimagines Life of John Maynard Keynes
James Graham, known for exploring the rise of Rupert Murdoch and Gareth Southgate's England team, now turns his attention to one of the 20th century's most influential political figures: John Maynard Keynes.
His new play, The Standard of Living, directed by Nicholas Hytner, opens at the Haymarket in September. It focuses on Keynes's life from 1917 until his death in 1946, a period in which he became the founding father of macroeconomics and reshaped government thinking on finance and the role of the arts.
Rory Kinnear will portray Keynes, a man whose story, according to Graham, is about 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 of the 1930s, he designed a method for governments to protect citizens from the “dysfunction of capitalism.” He argued that government intervention was vital to stabilise the economy, and that they should spend during economic hardship rather than waiting for markets to self-correct.
Economics was only one of Keynes's passions. Hytner, who recently directed John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in Giant, described Keynes as a “radical” who championed both economic reform and the arts. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, Keynes lived as an openly bisexual man.
The play also explores Keynes's relationships within the Bloomsbury circle, which included his friend Virginia Woolf and 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 his high-level state 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.”
Graham added: “People who love the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell are often not aware that one of the most impactful people of the 20th century was also hanging around in the same house – upstairs, writing a book.” That book was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes's seminal work addressing mass unemployment during the Great Depression. In 2017, it was voted the most influential academic text on British life.
In Britain, Keynes is remembered as the architect of an economic golden age: Keynesian principles underpinned GDP-per-head growth averaging 2.44% annually between 1950 and 1973. His ideas also intellectually supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the US.
Although Keynes had relationships with men, he surprised many when he married Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925. His best man was Duncan Grant. In the play, Lopokova will be portrayed by Royal Ballet dancer Natalia Osipova.
Keynes's sexuality attracted criticism. In 2013, historian Niall Ferguson apologised for remarks suggesting Keynes didn't care about future generations because he was childless and gay; in fact, Lopokova had miscarried.
Graham confirmed Virginia Woolf will appear in the play, alongside Keynes's intellectual rival Friedrich Hayek, who described Keynes as “the only really great man I ever knew,” despite their disagreements.
Graham and Hytner believe Keynes's ideas still resonate. “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.”
