Can you put a price on happiness, beauty and love?
Producers Brian & Dayna Lee and Nicholas Hytner have today announced the full cast for the world premiere of The Standard of Living, a new play written by three-time Olivier Award winner James Graham (Dear England), and directed by four-time Tony Award and three-time Olivier-award winner Nicholas Hytner (Giant), about one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers – John Maynard Keynes.
Husband to ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Lover to Duncan Grant. Friend to Virginia Woolf. Keynes moves between the corridors of power in Whitehall and the intoxicating freedom of a radical circle of artists, writers and lovers – all determined to live differently.
But as markets crash, old systems crumble and Britain teeters on the edge of chaos, one question begins to consume him: What is a good life?
Can art, love and human connection reshape the future before it’s too late? Or is the world too addicted to wealth and power to change?
Alive with music, dance, desire and debate, The Standard of Living is a thrilling, funny and deeply moving portrait of a man who dared to imagine something better.
Olivier Award winner Rory Kinnear (Skyfall) stars as John Maynard Keynes, the radical economist and member of the influential Bloomsbury Group who became the singular driving force behind arts funding in Britain and built a new and fairer financial model, that ultimately helped reshape the Western World in the aftermath of the First World War. Royal Ballet Principal Natalia Osipova makes her West End debut as the celebrated ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova, a soloist with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes who was considered the embodiment of the new era of modernist ballet.
Joining Kinnear and Osipova is Thomas Flynn (Bridgerton) as Keynes’ friend and lover Duncan Grant; Laurie Kynaston (Spring Awakening, Almeida Theatre) as Keynes’ great economic rival Friedrich Hayek; Pip Carter (1917) as writer and critic Lytton Strachey; Agatha Enecio who makes her professional stage debut as Bloomsbury group artist Dora Carrington; Naomi Frederick (As You Like It, Shakespeare’s Globe) as one of the 20th centuries leading writers, Virginia Woolf; Claire Price (The Second Best Marigold Hotel) as designer and Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell; and finally George Taylor (Rye Lane) as economist and father of the Welfare State, William Beveridge.
Completing the cast in the wider ensemble is Christopher Akrill, Luke Cinque-White Dannie Norman, Xolisweh Ana Richards and Ben Warwick .
Theatre Royal Haymarket, 18 Suffolk Street, London, SW1Y 4HT
From 21 September 2026 – 12 December 2026
Booking and full details: https://standardoflivingplay.com/
