Review: THE STANDARD OF LIVING at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Rory Kinnear as the Cambridge aesthete with a mind for macro economic matters, we are instantly drawn into the conflicting worlds which the great man inhabited — those of fusty Treasury Department corridors with their mandarins, graphs and theoretical market forces, juxtaposed with the avant-garde bohemian lifestyle of his friends in the Bloomsbury Set, which included painters Duncan Grant (Thomas Flynn) and Vanessa Bell (Claire Price) together with writers Lytton Strachey (Pip Carter) and Virginia Woolf (Naomi Frederick).

“Living in squares, painting in circles and loving in triangles” was the oft-attributed critical simplification levelled at the Bloomsbury group who were renowned for their scandalously unconventional marital arrangements and open bisexuality. Indeed the production even manages to incorporate a public lavatory encounter which manages to be both funny and informative.

Bob Crowley’s smart set leans heavily on sliding panels and flown-in shapes (which mirror Bell’s abstract compositions) onto which are projected images of the period. The actors maintain a snappy pace as they move in Keynes’ orbit and around the screens. For much of his life, the renowned advocate for the arts who recognised the part which culture could play in improving lives, was at odds with the establishment and established practices. He was present at Versailles after World War I when the victors demanded crippling reparations of defeated Germany. He challenged Churchill’s view that the world should return to the Gold Standard in the 1920s. He advocated for the USA to invest in huge public projects to break the grip of the Great Depression and was instrumental in championing the creation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the 1940s. It would be churlish to deny the huge impact which Keynesian economics played during the 20th century and continues to exert to this day.

Thrown into the powerful mix is ballerina Natalia Osipova who as Lydia “Firebird” Lopokova develops a relationship and later marries Keynes, much to the surprise and frequent irritation of his Bloomsbury circle. Also appearing in this production, is Laurie Kynaston as Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek who for many years directly challenged Keynes’ advocacy for centralised government intervention due to his personal experience of the destructiveness of rampant inflation.

In all, quite a challenging life to put onto stage but Graham has managed to elevate a mere sequence of historical milestones into something far more engaging and playful, brought to life by a terrific ensemble and a confident and astute central performance from the ever-watchable Kinnear.

THE STANDARD OF LIVING plays 2 hours and 30 minutes with interval, and continues at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 12th December.

The Standard of Living Tickets