First Look: The Standard of Living at Theatre Royal Haymarket

New rehearsal images have been released for the highly anticipated world premiere of The Standard of Living, James Graham’s new play about economist John Maynard Keynes. Rory Kinnear stars opposite Royal Ballet Principal Natalia Osipova and Thomas Flynn.

Take a behind the scenes look at rehearsals for the world premiere of The Standard of Living, a new play by three-time Olivier Award winner James Graham (Dear England), directed by four-time Tony Award and three-time Olivier Award winner Nicholas Hytner (Giant). The highly anticipated premiere arrives at the Theatre Royal Haymarket for a strictly limited 12-week engagement from 21 September.

Olivier Award winner Rory Kinnear (Skyfall) stars as John Maynard Keynes, the radical economist and member of the influential Bloomsbury Group who became a driving force behind arts funding in Britain and helped reshape the Western world’s financial model in the aftermath of the First World War. He is joined by Royal Ballet Principal dancer Natalia Osipova, who makes her West End debut as Lydia Lopokova, the celebrated ballet dancer who fell in love with and married Keynes.

The cast also includes Thomas Flynn (Bridgerton) as Keynes’s lover Duncan Grant, Laurie Kynaston (Spring Awakening) as Keynes’s economic rival Friedrich Hayek, Pip Carter (1917) as Lytton Strachey, Agatha Enecio, making her professional stage debut, as Dora Carrington, Naomi Frederick as Virginia Woolf, Claire Price as Vanessa Bell, Alex Blake as Clive Bell and George Taylor as economist William Beveridge.

The wider ensemble includes Christopher Akrill, Luke Cinque-White, Dannie Norman, Xolisweh Ana Richards and Ben Warwick.

See live availability for The Standard of Living here

Photos: The cast of The Standard of Living in rehearsals

Rory Kinnear as John Maynard Keynes in rehearsals for The Standard of Living. Photo by Manuel Harlan

Rehearsals for The Standard of Living. Photo by Manuel Harlan

James Graham in rehearsals for The Standard of Living. Photo by Manuel Harlan

About the play

The Standard of Living is a new work from James Graham that promises to be a thrilling, funny and deeply moving portrait of a man who dared to imagine something better. Husband to ballerina Lydia Lopokova, lover to Duncan Grant, and 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 determined to live differently. 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?

Tony and Olivier Award winning director Nicholas Hytner leads a creative team that includes set design by Bob Crowley, costume design by Jenny Beavan, movement direction by James Cousins, composition by Frank Moon, and ballet consultancy by Edward Watson, with lighting design by Bruno Poet, sound design by Carolyn Downing and projection design by Luke Halls. Casting is by Robert Sterne CDG.