From Bloombsbury to Whitehall: new play reimagines life of John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes (centre) at the UN international monetary and financial conference in New Hampshire, US, in July 1944. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty View image in fullscreen John Maynard Keynes (centre) at the UN international monetary and financial conference in New Hampshire, US, in July 1944. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty From Bloombsbury to Whitehall: new play reimagines life of John Maynard Keynes The Standard of Living by James Graham traces economist’s influence on British politics and culture UK politics live – latest updates After exploring the rise of Rupert Murdoch and the emergence of Gareth Southgate’s England team , James Graham has turned his attention 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, focuses on Keynes’s life from 1917 until his death in 1946 – a period in which he became the founding father of macroeconomics and reshaped government thinking on finance and the role of the arts. Rory Kinnear will play Keynes, a man whose story, according to Graham, is about the “great struggle of an outsider and a disruptor whom people resisted for most of his life”. View image in fullscreen Unemployed men receive soup and other food handouts at a breadline during the Great Depression in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: American Stock Archive/Getty Born in 1883, Keynes studied maths at Cambridge before turning to economics. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, he designed a method for governments to protect citizens from the “ dysfunction of capitalism ”. He argued that government intervention was vital to stabilise the economy, and that they should spend during periods of economic hardship, rather than waiting for markets to balance themselves. Economics was only one of Keynes’s passions. Hytner, who recently directed the Tony winner John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in Giant , said Keynes was a “radical” who championed the arts as well as economic reform. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Keynes lived as an out bisexual man. View image in fullscreen James Graham believes Keynes’s ideas about economics and society remain relevant. Photograph: Ron Adar/Shutterstock Graham’s play will also explore Keynes’s relationships within the Bloomsbury circle, a group of bohemians, writers and artists that included his friend Virginia Woolf and the painter Duncan Grant , described as the love of his life. “It starts with him at odds with Bloomsbury,” Hytner said, noting that many of Keynes’s contemporaries disapproved of his involvement at the highest levels of state. “He’s running down from Whitehall every weekend to Charleston, and they are – by and large – opposed to his involvement in the Treasury and the war,” Hytner said. View image in fullscreen The painter Duncan Grant with John Maynard Keynes in 1926. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images/Getty “His outlook was v