“The Standard of Living” officially raises the curtain in the West End: Rory Kinnear shines as John Maynard Keynes, critics hail James Graham’s new play

At a gala evening at the Theatre Royal Haymarket last night, “The Standard of Living” officially raised the curtain in the West End, giving London another major play by James Graham. The play, directed by Nicholas Hytner, brings to the stage the life of the economist John Maynard Keynes — from the corridors of the British Treasury to the bohemian life of the Bloomsbury Set — with Rory Kinnear in the central role, as London Box Office reports.

The first critics agree: Kinnear is the heart of the production. His portrayal of Keynes — the Cambridge aesthete with a mind for macroeconomics — is threaded through with a fine balance between the office official, the romantic lover and the intellectual who challenges the establishment, from post-First World War Versailles to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1940s.

Alongside Kinnear, the ballet star Natalia Osipova makes her West End debut as Lydia “Firebird” Lopokova, the Russian ballerina who married Keynes, to the surprise — and frequent irritation — of his artistic circle. The cast also includes Laurie Kynaston as the ideological rival Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Flynn as the painter Duncan Grant, Claire Price as Vanessa Bell, Pip Carter as Lytton Strachey and Naomi Frederick as Virginia Woolf, according to London Box Office.

Director Nicholas Hytner, returning to work with Graham after “The History Boys” and “This House”, supports the play with an elegant set design by Bob Crowley — sliding panels and flown shapes onto which images of the era are projected, with a fast pace that keeps the two-and-a-half-hour show alive.

“The Standard of Living” is a world production that goes straight to the West End, at a time when London stages need bold new writing, as Graham himself stressed at the presentation. The play runs at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until December 12, in a limited twelve-week season.