James Graham’s “The Standard of Living” at the Theatre Royal Haymarket: All-Embracing Account Of The Life And Career Of John Maynard Keynes

Timing is everything: James Graham’s new political history play, The Standard of Living, aptly opens on the very same day that UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivers his first, and highly emotional, conference speech to the Labour Party Conference. Just as Burnham is widely seen as inspiring the nation with his vision of a better country, so the playwright tells the story of another paragon of public life, the economist John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas — among other things — helped save global capitalism after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It’s a big subject, so can this docudrama do it justice?

The short answer is yes. Graham’s epic is an all-embracing account of Keynes’s life, from a coy Edwardian moment as an academic nerd addressing the Apostles group at Cambridge University, saying, “Many of you are feeling daunted by this subject matter…”, to the establishment of the Arts Council in 1946, the subjects covered are impressively comprehensive: art buying in Paris; Versailles peace conference and his 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace critique; his 1936 General Theory; his affairs with Bloomsbury Group members Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey; chatting to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell at bohemian Charleston; marrying Ballets Russes dancer Lydia Lopokova; helping set up the IMF and World Bank; getting credit to bail out bankrupt postwar Britain. Phew.

It has to be said that Graham tackles all this with a light touch: he’s good on revealing small details, such as the little black book in which Keynes kept details of his cottaging, and other sexual encounters, a kind of accountant’s record at a time when homosexual acts were illegal. Joyfully, there’s a passage about his flirtatious meeting with Albert Einstein. There are jokes about Vanessa designing her sister Virginia’s book covers; a Cézanne painting left in a ditch; Strachey’s waspish comments are given humorous space. At one point in Cambridge during the war, both Keynes and his mots violent opponent, Viennese libertarian Friedrich Hayek, find themselves on the same rooftop fire-watching shift. Graham imagines their, otherwise unrecorded, dialogue.

The play’s central themes are the big economic ones of state investment to produce full-employment and growth versus free-market laissez-faire, symbolized by Hayek. The continued relevance of these competing theories hardly needs underlining, and the material about Beveridge and the Welfare State is neatly offset by a brief glimpse of Margaret Thatcher, whose favourite economist was Hayek. But Graham emphasizes the humanitarian rather than just the political side of the story by having Keynes repeatedly ask, “What is a good life?” The Bloomsbury experiment in free-living and free-loving, artistic creativity and sexual fluidity, takes centre stage, even as its ultimate failure, and cost in suicides, is truthfully acknowledged.

In a way that is reminiscent of Lucy Prebble’s Enron, Graham uses several devices to make economics clear to the audience. In one, his Keynes takes out a one-pound note and shows how a temporary loan of this cash can ripple through a local economy of pub, hotel, traders and shops, stimulating growth before returning to the lender. Another episode is a debate performed as a tango. The play is written with a great deal of clarity, with a great balance between public ideas and personal relationships. The central argument that economic policy must contribute actively to the greater good, and that leaving society in the hands of the free market leads only to widespread pain, is not controversial in progressive circles.

So, like many political plays, The Standard of Living is more affirmative of progress than provocative, although, as ever, Graham takes great pains to give Hayek and his ideas the respect they deserve. All of which leaves only the play itself to question. It’s ambitious and entirely pleasurable, although only if you know your cultural and political history of the first half of the 20th century. Anyone coming to this show who doesn’t already know a fair amount about Keynes’s achievements and the Bloomsbury Group’s bohemianism and their place in the story of modernism, might find the evening difficult. It’s a pretty dense watch. It is also more fun than deep.

Nicholas Hytner’s epic production of this epic play has a confident sweep that is often a joy to watch: ballet dancers cross the stage and large flats show photographs from history or abstract colour fields during the scene changes on designer Bob Crowley’s bare stage, dotted with a minimum of furniture. But the joy of the evening is in the acting, whose beating heart is Rory Kinnear, radiating charm and a real passion for humane social change, often frustrated but always alert to the humanity involved in politics. His relationship with Lydia Lopokova, the acting debut of Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova, is rather sentimentally sweet, although she gives as good as she gets when the Bloomsberries mock her.

The bohemians are well characterised by brief cameos of its sketched-out members: Pip Carter’s acidic Strachey, Naomi Frederick’s sharply intellectual Virginia Woolf, West-End debuting Thomas Flynn’s arty Duncan Grant, plus Claire Price’s Vanessa and Agatha Enecio’s Carrington. But these are just glimpses. More memorable is Laurie Kynaston’s passionately critical Hayek and his ally, for a while, George Taylor’s studious-looking Beveridge. The whole cast help the play, which is also a loving advocacy of the arts in general, and theatre in particular, to warm the heart. When I get back home, there’s a busker outside the tube station and he’s lip-synching to Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love” — somehow the timing feels perfectly right.

• The Standard of Living is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 12 December.