THE STANDARD OF LIVING Theatre Royal Haymarket, W1

THE ECONOMIST AND THE BALLERINA That “iron streak of tinsel” which Alan Bennett once observed in Nicholas Hytner has again come good, giving us a play about early 20c economic theory which we can go home humming. Literally: I am happy to report that on the way out I both overheard both the words “of course the money supply..” , and “Cezanne”, and several were humming tunes from Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet. I call that a result. James Graham hit on the life of the economist John Maynard Keynes at, we are told, this director’s suggestion. It’s a good fit because Graham has a particular capacity to absorb other people’s professional ideas and technicalities in extraordinary detail, and meld them with his eager, curious desire to understand human feelings and needs even in the oddest public figures. And Keynes happened to be not only a great mind, which forged a theory of economics as a moral science tasked to to enable a “good life” for ordinary people, but an unusual member of the…