The Gold Standard
| By: | John Banville |
| Publisher: | The Gallery Press |
| Published: | September 2026 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Categories: | Play |
| Language: | English |
| Available as: | Hardback, Paperback |
| On sale at: |
‘Money is the root of all happiness.’ So begins John Banville’s elaborate drama, The Gold Standard, which centres on John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) whose theories changed the policies and practices of governments. It comes to life, however, in its depiction of his social circle and their ‘tangled lives’. A member of the Bloomsbury Set, Keynes enjoyed relationships with the artist Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey before he married the Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, scornfully castigated by Virginia Woolf and others for her manners and humble social status. Among other things, it is a play about snobbery and meanness to an outsider who takes away ‘one of their own’. Epic in scale, The Gold Standard spans both world wars and charts the fall of England as the global financial superpower.