Theatre review: The Standard of Living

Combining arts, politics, economics and bisexuality, James Graham has already chosen John Maynard Keynes for Radio 4's Great Lives, it was only a matter of time before he wrote a play about him. The Standard of Living takes us from the start of the First World War to the fallout from the Second as the economist Keynes* (Rory Kinnear) starts to get the ear of the government despite being a conscientious objector. He spends his days with the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf (Naomi Frederick,) Vanessa Bell (Claire Price) and his ex, Lytton Strachey (Pip Carter,) and this immersion in the world of the arts combines with his economic theories when he manages to convince an already debt-ridden government to invest in the art collection of the recently-deceased French painter Edgar Degas.

Theatre review: Cleansed

A pair of fraternal twins are separated; the female twin, believing her brother to be dead, goes to a strange and possibly dangerous place where she takes on his identity, only to reconnect with him in an unexpected way. It's one of the main plots of Twelfth Night, which Sarah Kane cited as an inspiration for Cleansed, but it's fair to say that she interpreted it in a slightly different way than Shakespeare did. A lot more incestuously, for one thing. Grace (Pearl Chanda) tracks down the hospital-like place where her brother Graham (Jack Riddiford) died of a heroin overdose. The body's long since been cremated so she isn't able to say goodbye to him in that way, instead wearing his clothes and starting to take on his mannerisms. She willingly puts herself under the control of Tinker, the violent and twisted man everyone calls a doctor, but who seems to be anything but a healer.