“The Standard of Living”: Rory Kinnear as John Maynard Keynes in the new West End premiere

The first official production photos for “The Standard of Living,” James Graham’s new play about the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, were released today, as the show is in rehearsals at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket. The photos released by the production show Olivier Award winner Rory Kinnear in the role of Keynes, alongside Royal Ballet star Natalia Osipova, who with this role makes her West End debut as the economist’s wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

The play, directed by Nicholas Hytner, focuses on Keynes’s private life — the man whose ideas helped rebuild Britain after the First World War. Kinnear plays Keynes opposite Osipova as Lopokova, the Ballets Russes ballerina who married the economist, while he continued a relationship with the painter Duncan Grant, played by Thomas Flynn. Around them moves the famous Bloomsbury Group circle: Laurie Kynaston plays his rival, Friedrich Hayek, while the cast also includes Naomi Frederick as Virginia Woolf.

“The story of Keynes here is not the one economics students learn,” the production writes about the play. Author James Graham, who won the Olivier Award for “Dear England,” has chosen to dramatize the human triangle of Bloomsbury — a completely different dimension from the history-lecture version the audience expects about the economist.

“The Standard of Living” is currently in rehearsals at Theatre Royal Haymarket and officially opens on Tuesday, September 29, for a strictly limited 12-week season running through December 12, 2026. The production is a world premiere coming straight to the West End, a clear signal of the producers’ high expectations for this play, as West End Theatre reports.