Still only 44, James Graham has become a formidable chronicler of our national story. On themes such as the rise of Rupert Murdoch, social upheaval in post-industrial Britain and the neuroses of the England men’s football team, the playwright and screenwriter has made it his vocation to read the signs of our times and write them up for the stage.
Graham’s new play goes a bit further back in history, but its subject matter is characteristically of the moment. Opening this week in the West End, The Standard of Living offers a portrait of the sentimental and intellectual passions of John Maynard Keynes (played by Rory Kinnear), as the great economist makes his name between the first and second world wars. As Keynes rails against the laissez-faire ethos of the age, he seeks to devise a theory of growth that justifies state intervention on people’s behalf in the wake of the Great Depression.
A month out from the first budget to be delivered by Andy Burnham’s government, the contemporary relevance is not hard to spot. Ever since the prime minister pledged to bring an “end to 40 years of neoliberalism” and launch a new era of public investment to bring about growth, his opponents have sought to characterise that project as a reckless Labour version of Trussism. Discussion of the nation’s political direction has been reduced to a numbers game relentlessly focused on bond yields, debt levels and what markets will or will not countenance.
John Healey may or may not take a seat in the stalls during the play’s scheduled run. But just as Graham’s Labour of Love presciently addressed the Labour party’s problems in its red wall heartlands, and Dear England explored a nation’s insecurities through sporting anxiety, his latest offering captures the zeitgeist in a way that goes beyond the contents of the chancellor’s budget briefcase.
The economic historian Robert Skidelsky, who died this year, observed that “our age has eerily come to rhyme with Keynes’s”. In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, nationalist threats to the global order have multiplied and the far right has been able to mobilise popular discontent at declining living standards. Whether progressive governments can negotiate the fiscal room for manoeuvre to allow them to respond effectively is a key issue of our time. Meanwhile, the existential threat posed by unregulated artificial intelligence has taken the laissez-faire debate on to new and alarming territory.
Graham and Nicholas Hytner, the director of The Standard of Living, are too skilled to allow such echoes to add up to a sombre night out. Keynes’s marriage to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopukhova, for example, is deftly exploited to make dance a metaphor for what a graceful balance of economic forces might look like. Perhaps the highlight of the evening thus becomes a vigorous pas de deux across the stage involving Keynes and his free-marketeering rival, Friedrich Hayek, choreographed to the rhythm of an argument about interest rates.
Ideas, art, love affairs and the bohemian excesses of the Bloomsbury set all compete for audience attention. At a time when the common good risks being undermined by market imperatives, algorithmic abstractions and rogue AI agents, Graham has once again produced a play that poses the right question at the right time: how can humans take back control?
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