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James Graham is probably the most successful British playwright of our age, having scored hit after hit from the unlikeliest subjects, from his breakthrough This House – about the whipping operation in the hung parliament of the ’70s – to his most recent Punch, his staging of the true story of a fatality caused by a single punch that went on to win every major theatre award going this season gone.
He’s also done pretty handily on TV, often with adaptations of his plays – the recent Dear England being a prime example – but with original stories too, notably his hit BBC series Sherwood.
That’s all a way of saying that a new James Graham play is a big deal, and that while most of them are – frankly – about superficially boring sounding subjects, he is phenomenal at spinning relatively dry historic episodes into wildly entertaining gold.
Hence we have The Standard of Living. Graham’s latest play will star Rory Kinnear as radical economist and Bloomsbury Group stalwart John Maynard Keynes, whose theories that a government could spend its way out of a recession have proven immensely influential in the years and decades that followed. Graham’s play sees Keynes and his radical circle – including his wife Lydia Lopokova and lover Duncan Grant – facing up to the Great Depression. Fresh from his success with the Tony-winning Giant, Bridge boss Nicholas Hytner directs.
The Standard of Living is at Theatre Royal Haymarket, Sep 21-Dec 12.
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