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After the search the rise of Rupert Murdoch and the exit of Gareth Southgate The England teamJames Graham turns to one of the most important political figures of the 20th century: John Maynard Keynes.
His new play, The Standard of Living, directed by Nicholas Hytner and opening at the Haymarket in September, it focuses on Keynes’s life from 1917 to his death in 1946 – a time when he became the founding father of macroeconomics and reformed public opinion on economics and the arts.
Rory Kinnear will play Keynes, a man whose story, according to Graham, is about “the great struggle of an outsider and an outsider who has been rejected by society for the rest of his life”.
Born in 1883, Keynes studied mathematics at Cambridge before turning to economics. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, he created a way for governments to protect citizens from “the ineffectiveness of capitalism“.
He said that government intervention is very important to stabilize the economy, and that they should take advantage of the economic crisis, instead of just waiting for the markets to agree.
Economics was one of Keynes’s interests. Hytner, who recently directed Tony winner John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in Gianthe said Keynes was a “major” who encouraged art and economic reform. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Keynes lived as a gay man.
Graham’s play will also highlight Keynes’s relationships within the Bloomsbury circle, a group of bohemians, writers and artists that included his friend Virginia Woolf and the artist. Duncan Granthe is described as the love of his life.
“It starts with him going against Bloomsbury,” Hytner said, noting that many of Keynes’s contemporaries did not approve of his involvement in higher government.
“He’s coming down from Whitehall every weekend to Charleston, and – basically – he’s against getting involved in the Treasury and the war,” Hytner said.
“His view was very large created by professional artists.
Graham says: “People who like Bloomsbury Group are Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell often don’t know that one of the most influential people of the 20th century also lived in the same house – upstairs, writing a book. “
That book was The Basic Theory of Work, Interest and MoneyKeynes’s seminal work, which sought answers to unemployment of the Great Depression. In 2017, he voted the most influential academic literature on British life.
In Britain, he is remembered as the brain behind the economic years: Keynesian principles were behind GDP-per-head growth that was 2.44% per year between 1950 and 1973. A New Job in the US.
Although Keynes had relationships with men, he surprised his friends and colleagues when in 1925, at the age of 42, he married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina and star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His best man was Grant. In The Standard of Living, he will sing with Royal Ballet dancer Natalia Osipova.
Keynes’ sexuality made him the subject of criticism. In 2013, Niall Ferguson apologized because of the words “stupid and unwise” suggesting that the economist did not care about future generations because he was childless and gay. In fact, Lopokova had miscarried.
Graham confirmed that Virgina Woolf would appear in the play, along with Keynes’ intellectual rival, Friedrich Hayek, whom Keynes described as “the only great man I ever knew”, although he disagreed with the Austrian economist and philosopher on many points.
Graham and Hytner believe that Keynes’s ideas are still valid. Hytner said: “The problems we are facing now seem so insurmountable that we seem paralyzed. “We seem to lack confidence in our ability to act quickly.
