Rory Kinnear, Natalia Osipova and Luke Cinque White in The Standard of Living [Manuel Harlan]

“WHAT is a good life?” So John Maynard Keynes, charismatically played by Rory Kinnear, asks at the opening of James Graham’s entertaining play about the economist’s life, work and marriage to the celebrated ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova – Natalia Osipova, a Royal Ballet principal, makes a confident West End debut.

That question lies at the heart of The Standard of Living. Keynes maintained that a secure society, whose material needs are met, is best placed to appreciate and participate in the arts.

Graham takes us through Keynes’s colourful private life and his years at the Treasury, where his ideas about government spending helped reshape the Western world in the aftermath of two world wars. He also believed the arts should be publicly funded and helped found the Arts Council.

Keynes was bisexual and mixed with the Bloomsbury set, counting the writer and critic Lytton Strachey (Pip Carter) and Virginia Woolf (Naomi Frederick) as friends, and taking the artist Duncan Grant (Thomas Flynn) as one of many lovers.

The second half focuses on Keynes’s relationship with his intellectual opponent, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston). Keynes held that in times of recession government spending could promote growth, while Hayek argued that intervention could do more harm than good.

Graham’s intelligent drama interweaves the personal and political to great effect, though in covering so many bases, nuance is occasionally lost.

Nicholas Hytner’s assured staging and Bob Crowley’s sliding panels, displaying both art and period footage, beautifully illustrate the play’s central themes, and the supporting cast are terrific. The dance sequences underline the importance of culture, but I found them an unnecessary distraction.

Until December 12
trh.co.uk/