Keynes and the Ballerina

There is something to be said for a hot-ticket London play that features debates between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. “The Standard of Living,” a new work by prolific theatrical British hit-maker James Graham, tells the story of Keynes, the Cambridge professor who died in 1946, aged just 63, bequeathing an immense philosophical influence upon Western economic policy and institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. The play, which opened earlier this week at the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket, is something of a love letter to a man whom Mr. Graham patently adores.Nevertheless, it is a bold idea to create a drama about a pin-striped economist. Not exactly jazz hands. But Mr. Graham — whose plays include “Ink,” a Broadway transfer about the rise of the Murdoch-owned tabloid press, and who skilfully mines recent history for material — has an instinct for a subject. He knows what will strike a chord, one both clever and commercial.When the West is drowning in debt, it feels timely to look at Keynesian economics and their belief — bold or delusional, according to taste — that spending non-existent government cash is the best way to regain prosperity. In our dangerously unserious age, there is something frankly inspired about presenting us with a figure who radiates intellectual integrity rather than vibes. Keynes, we can be sure, would never have made a TikTok video promoting the role of the state in preventing the dysfunction of capitalism.In the central role, acclaimed theatre actor Rory Kinnear carries the play with apparent ease and droll intelligence. His very presence — bald, self-effacing, oddly appealing — is a reassurance. When he debates with Hayek, a wonderful performance by Laurie Kynaston as the ardent believer in free markets, the robust clash of ideology makes us think. So too when Keynes stands alone, centre stage, and asks: “What is a good life? And can that life, a life that is enriched and fulfilled, can it be quantified and measured; are there equations and formulas for that? Well, you might not think that, and reasonably so, but I am here today to tell you that I believe it can…”The play begins with this speech, creating a tingle of Keynesian hope that this will be a very special evening with its A-list production team — director Nicholas Hytner; scene-shifting sliding-panel set by Bob Crowley — and its admirable ambition. Wordiness, worthiness, on the West End stage.And yet, over “The Standard of Living” there seems to hang a giant spectre, of the writer who brought glamour to the driest of concepts, and showmanship to the greyest of suits. What gold, one cannot help but wonder, would Tom Stoppard have spun from this subject matter?He would certainly have had a ball with the scenes set in Bloomsbury, where Keynes led his other life away from the Treasury in World War I, from the fractious negotiations after World War II — mixing it with Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and his ex-lovers Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. In “The Standard of Living,”the Bloomsburies are so dismal that one feels it would have been a lot more fun at Bretton Woods. The characters simply smoke and snipe at each other, accepting Keynes’s financial patronage while attacking him for how he earns the money.But they are integral to the play. For what James Graham wants to show is that the man from Whitehall contained, within his impeccably buttoned suit, a vast romantic soul. The play’s contention, in fact, is that the optimism — both measured and boundless — within Keynes’s economics philosophy is linked to his passionate love of the arts, to his clarion call of “Do! Act! Be!” Which, as delivered by Kinnear, is a moving expression of hope — in every possible way.Its living symbol comes in the form of the woman who Keynes would marry in 1925: The St Petersburg-born star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova. This liaison, between the dedicated homosexual with the planet-sized brain, and the pirouetting charmer with an imperfect command of English, surely ranks as one of the most unlikely in history. The Bloomsburies smoke and snipe all the more furiously as their man is stolen from them by a woman whom Lytton Strachey described in real life as “half-witted.”As played, with fine comic timing, by the Royal Ballet’s Natalia Osipova — whose incandescent star quality fairly burns up the stage — the incongruity of the match is all the clearer. Yet so too is the love between Keynes and Lydia, whose scenes together are simple and touching. Seeing Ms. Osipova dance is always a breathtaking treat. Although the device of having her perform excerpts from “The Firebird” around groups of austere civil servants — a representation of Keynes’s vital inner life, we get it — is too blatant an attempt to generate theatricality in a play that often lacks it.The ability to spin drama out of ideas, as perfected by Stoppard, is a rare one. Like Keynes himself, whose hopes came up hard against reality, “The Standard of Living” tries for something that it does not quite achieve. Like him, it tries nobly. One wonders whether eventually — especially if a transfer to Broadway becomes likely — it might be shortened, its focus tightened, those wretched Bloomsburies put in their place. Either way, however, it is a play worth seeing and very much worth thinking about.

Keynes and the Ballerina

Keynes and the Ballerina

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