James Graham's Keynes play opens in West End with Rory Kinnear

James Graham's new play about John Maynard Keynes, The Standard of Living, has opened in the West End, with Rory Kinnear playing the economist. The play looks at Keynes's professional ideas and his personal life, including his marriage, his bisexuality and his place in the Bloomsbury Group.

Graham said he had been mildly obsessed with Keynes for a very long time and considered him one of the most impactful figures of the 20th century in Britain and globally. He admitted that economics frightened him almost as much as it might frighten a theatre audience, but argued Keynes was extraordinary, a Renaissance man. Keynes was friends with the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, painters and artists. Graham said this inspired him, and that Keynes asked a big question: can you measure beauty, art, experiences and relationships, and can an economist put a value on them?

Keynes was gay but married, which Graham described as very unusual for the time. He said the Bloomsbury set in the early 1900s pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable emotionally, sexually and socially, in ways that might speak to younger audiences who think of themselves as gender fluid, sexually open or polyamorous. The play also looks at Keynes's case for state intervention. Graham said there are similar arguments now, including from Andy Burnham on public investment. Graham said people feel they have lost agency and control over their lives and communities. Keynes represented intervention in bad times, rather than letting things naturally correct themselves. The play shows how Keynes struggled to convince people. Graham said Burnham seems to have had a better start than his predecessor, though some criticise him for performance and messaging. He said if you cannot sum up your mission and enlist people, you will never get big things done. He would love Burnham and the Chancellor to see the play and remind themselves of the scale of change Keynes achieved.

Graham said his main driving passion is to make dry subjects about power and systems entertaining. He said that with toxic platforms and short-term bursts of information, there is still something to be said for sitting in a dark theatre for two hours and investing in a story. He also raised concerns about opportunities for newer voices, saying it is financially tough to sustain a career if you are from a working-class background. He said arts have been lost from secondary school education and that complacency has set in across education, government and cultural institutions that thinks talent will naturally replenish. Like Keynes, he argued, you have to intervene when you can see it going wrong.

The production also examines a broader idea of Keynesian thought. It covers Keynes's passion for art as part of the Bohemian Bloomsbury set, his bisexuality at a time of rigid convention, and his quest to define and attain a good life for himself and others. For the last 25 years of his life, his wife was the Russian ballerina Lidia Lopokova. She is portrayed by Natalia Osipova, a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, in her first leap into dramatic acting. Osipova said the experience was huge stress and very different from dance, where your soul starts moving and you tell a story. She said she looked to colleagues and learned a little more each day. Her colleagues joked that she had turned into a professional actress in four to five weeks, while it would take much longer for them to become prima ballet dancers.

Graham's career includes plays such as This House and Dear England, and he has examined intersections of British culture and politics. In Keynes, he found a subject ripe for exploration. His most radical idea, Graham said, was inverting the classical economic model: instead of cutting in difficult times, as austerity would, you should spend and grow your way out of recession. Asked what advice Keynes might have ahead of a first budget, Graham said Keynes would say: you have momentum, popularity and time, so do not fiddle around the edges. Go into communities, put the human being and their experience at the centre of policies, and think big. Keynes was also a famously nice man, supporting his friends and thinking about the greater good. Since his death in 1946, his ideas have been adopted and rejected, but at their centre was an unconventional life lived to the full.