After exploring the rise of Rupert Murdoch and the emergence of Gareth Southgate’s England team, James Graham has turned his attention to one of the most important political figures of the 20th century: John Maynard Keynes.

His new play, The Standard of Living, directed by Nicholas Hytner and opening at the Haymarket in September, focuses on Keynes’s life from 1917 until his death in 1946 – a period in which he became the founding father of macroeconomics and reshaped government thinking on finance and the role of the arts.

Rory Kinnear will play Keynes, a man whose story, according to Graham, is about the “great struggle of an outsider and a disruptor whom people resisted for most of his life”.

Born in 1883, Keynes studied maths at Cambridge before turning to economics. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, he designed a method for governments to protect citizens from the “dysfunction of capitalism”.

He argued that government intervention was vital to stabilise the economy, and that they should spend during periods of economic hardship, rather than waiting for markets to balance themselves.

Economics was only one of Keynes’s passions. Hytner, who recently directed the Tony winner John Lithgow as Roald Dahl in Giant, said Keynes was a “radical” who championed the arts as well as economic reform. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Keynes lived as an out bisexual man.

Graham’s play will also explore Keynes’s relationships within the Bloomsbury circle, a group of bohemians, writers and artists that included his friend Virginia Woolf and the painter Duncan Grant, described as the love of his life.

“It starts with him at odds with Bloomsbury,” Hytner said, noting that many of Keynes’s contemporaries disapproved of his involvement at the highest levels of state.

“He’s running down from Whitehall every weekend to Charleston, and they are – by and large – opposed to his involvement in the Treasury and the war,” Hytner said.

“His outlook was very large shaped by artists. Those were the people who were most influential on him: painters, novelists, and critics.”

Graham said: “People who love the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell are often not aware that one of the most impactful people of the 20th century was also hanging around in the same house – upstairs, writing a book.”

That book was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes’s seminal work, which sought solutions to the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. In 2017, it was voted the most influential academic text on British life.

In Britain, he’s remembered for being the brains behind an economic golden age: Keynesian principles were behind GDP-per-head growth that averaged 2.44% a year between 1950 and 1973. His ideas also provided the intellectual ballast that underpinned Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US.

Although Keynes had relationships with men, he surprised his friends and acquaintances when in 1925, at the age of 42, he married Lydia Lopokova, the Russian ballerina and star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. His best man was Grant. In the The Standard of Living, she will be played by the Royal Ballet dancer Natalia Osipova.

Keynes’s sexuality made him the subject of criticism. In 2013, Niall Ferguson apologised for “stupid and tactless” remarks suggesting that the economist did not care about future generations because he was childless and gay. In fact, Lopokova had miscarried.

Graham confirmed that Virgina Woolf would appear in the play, alongside Keynes’s intellectual rival Friedrich Hayek, who described Keynes as “the only really great man I ever knew”, despite disagreeing with him on many principles.

Graham and Hytner believe Keynes’s ideas still resonate. “The problems that we’re currently facing seem so intractable that we appear to be paralysed,” Hytner said. “We appear not to be confident about our ability to take radical action. And he was nothing if not radical.”

Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger is playing a lighthouse keeper in the new film from Happy as Lazzaro director Alice Rohrwacher, which is currently filming on the Italian island of Stromboli.

According to reports in the Italian media, Jagger was photographed on arrival in Stromboli after flying in by helicopter to take a role in Three Incestuous Sisters, Rohrwacher’s adaptation of the 2005 “visual novel” by The Time Traveler’s Wife author Audrey Niffenegger.

Rohrwacher, who received considerable acclaim for Happy as Lazzaro, which won best screenplay at Cannes in 2018, and its 2023 followup La Chimera, which starred Josh O’Connor as a looter of ancient artefacts, is making her English-language debut with Three Incestuous Sisters, Niffenegger’s self-created fairytale about three sisters who fall in love with a lighthouse keeper’s son.

Jagger joins the previously announced cast of Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Saoirse Ronan and O’Connor; the latter is playing his character’s son. The musician has appeared sporadically in feature films over the years, including lead roles in Performance and Ned Kelly (both released in 1970), and smaller roles in 1992 sci-fi yarn Freejack, 1997 play adaptation Bent, and 2001 drama The Man from Elysian Fields. Jagger has also been active as a producer, with projects including second world war codebreaker drama Enigma, all-female comedy remake The Women, and James Brown biopic Get on Up.

Pulitzer prize officials awarded the fiction award to an author with a long history in fantasy, horror and young adult novels: Daniel Kraus, cited for Angel Down, a first world war narrative that unfolds in one long sentence. Liberation, Bess Wohl’s look back at the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, received the drama prize.

Winners announced on Monday included two books rooted in the founding of the US. Jill Lepore’s We the People: A History of the US Constitution won for history, and Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution was the winner for biography.

Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, her blunt account of the suicides of her two sons, was cited for memoir-autobiography. Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America won for general nonfiction.

The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poeticas, and the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for Picaflor: A Future Myth, a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires.

The 50-year-old Kraus has had a diverse and prolific career that includes collaborations with film-makers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Pulitzer officials praised Angel Down as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence”.

Wohl’s memory play collects second-wave feminists from all walks of life as they tackle misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse and gender roles. The play navigates between past and present, and six of the actors disrobe for the act two opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony award nominations, when Liberation is expected to be named in the best new play category.

The Guardian’s Adrian Horton praised Liberation in a four-star review.

“The play offers no concrete answers; one’s personal politics and choices remain, as ever, a thicket of contradictions,” she wrote. “Liberation finds, in that, an immutable and potent grief – for the costs of our failings, for all that’s been lost, for the questions we thought too late to ask. But that doesn’t mean, as this provocative play suggests, that we shouldn’t still ask them.”

It’s the question most often posed to artists: where do you get your ideas from? David Haig’s answer is: I ask Google. Preserve the mystique, man! Haig is celebrated both as an actor (Killing Eve, The Thin Blue Line) and playwright, whose 2004 hit My Boy Jack was adapted for TV and whose follow-up Pressure is now a forthcoming Hollywood movie. His mouthwatering latest play dramatises the friendship between writer and spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle and escapologist and rationalist Harry Houdini. It’s such a fascinating double act, one assumes Haig must have long nursed an interest in their story. The truth is more prosaic. “I mundanely Googled ‘interesting unusual relationships in British history’,” he tells me. “And that’s what came up.”

Should we admire the man’s honesty (What do you think of AI Overviews? “It’s unavoidably useful”) or deplore his lack of romance? Not coincidentally, these are the same questions raised by Magic, opening in Chichester this month, and probing the friendship-then-friction between Conan Doyle, convinced he can communicate with the dead, and Houdini, unsentimentally calling a fraud a fraud. “For these two dissimilar men to meld together when they meet, it was like a chemical bonding, then to find this critical element that tests and challenges their relationship, I thought that was absolutely fascinating.”

Magic – whose production, by director Lucy Bailey, promises gasp-inducing illusions alongside the drama – stages the pair’s coming together then splitting apart, as Conan Doyle and his wife Jean seek contact with his son Kingsley, killed in the first world war, through the spirit medium Mina Crandon – and Houdini assembles “an army of debunkers” to expose Crandon’s fakery. “Having gone to so many seances himself, pursuing the spirit of his own mother, [Houdini] became viscerally angry and perceived them as abuse of the grieving,” says Haig.

You might expect modern audiences to be wholly on Houdini’s side. But Conan Doyle will be played by Haig himself, who as an actor has won the nation’s heart with all his buttoned-up bureaucrats and establishment Englishmen struggling to keep their upper lip stiff. It’s crucial, he tells me, that audiences sympathise with Conan Doyle, and don’t see his faith as an object of ridicule. “He was seeking a religion that was scientifically based. At the time, it was thought that electromagnetism might absolutely be a means to contact the spirits of the dead. That may now seem ludicrous, but the energy of Conan Doyle’s optimism was always engaging. Hopefully there are lots of laughs in the play, but one of the great challenges is to ensure that element is not played as comedy.”

What interests Haig, in a play he says is all about ambivalences, is that both characters had mixed feelings about their own fame: “Houdini wanted not to be an entertainer but a great writer – like Conan Doyle.” And Conan Doyle felt his most beloved creation, Sherlock Holmes, to be far beneath him: “He was like a great Shakespearean actor trapped in a sitcom all his life.” There’s ambivalence too – hence the show’s title – about the distinctions between faith and fakery. “That’s another theme of the play: how do you define the word ‘magic’? What do you mean by it? Is a spiritual faith a form of magic? Or does it require deception and fakery to be magic?”

Haig approaches all this material, he tells me, from a position of lifelong rationalism. Not for him any sentimentality about how writers get their ideas for plays. “Unless you feel this deep calling to write about something specific,” he says, in defence of his Googling, “you need a little bit of help along the way!

“In Magic, I am playing someone with profound faith, and yet if an atheist can be a profound atheist – well, that’s me. And yet, when people are at their most certain, they’re also suspect, aren’t they?” His grandmother attended “a huge number” of seances, he says – but he has attended none. “I would go to one; I’d be fascinated. But I haven’t, I don’t know why.” But there is in his work an enduring interest in bereavement and the lingering presence of the dead. My Boy Jack was likewise about a son killed in the first world war, a coincidence Haig seems surprised to hear me point out – and which he ascribes in part to the death of his own sister at the age of 22.

That was 44 years ago; Haig is 70 now and contemplating if not mortality then at least redundancy. “I think this may be [my last play],” he tells me, if uncertainly. “How long do you go on for? How secure is it as you move through your 70s? You think of McKellen and Dame Judi Dench, still faultless as performers. But that’s not the case for everyone. So I just don’t know where it’s going to head yet.” But if it were all to stop now, Haig would look back on a satisfyingly distinctive career, the master of not one theatre-making craft, but two. “I would be very, very reassured,” he pronounces, with characteristic English understatement, “that things have, on the whole, been fulfilling.”

It has all the makings of a classic Val McDermid mystery: a sudden death, a cast of shadowy figures and a tangle of motives buried beneath layers of official secrecy.

But this time, the queen of crime is not inventing a murder, she is revisiting one of history’s most enduring whodunnits – the mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe.

In her new play, And Midnight Never Come, McDermid explores the controversial circumstances around the death of the brilliant and subversive Elizabethan playwright who was stabbed to death in a Deptford tavern at the age of 29. Officially, Marlowe was killed over a row about a bill. Unofficially? Espionage, heresy and a state-sanctioned cover-up are all in the frame.

“This play has been a long time in the making, I started thinking about it more than 40 years ago,” McDermid said. “Over the years, I think I’ve read pretty much everything that’s been written about Marlowe.

“And I think there’s another story lurking in the background here. I’ve got my own theory of what happened. I don’t want to give away spoilers, but I will say that I don’t think Christopher Marlowe was meant to die that day. My conclusion will surprise people, but I think it will also make sense of something people have long found unsatisfactory.”

Researchers widely believe Marlowe worked as an intelligence agent during his lifetime, most likely within the spy network of Sir Francis Walsingham.

In 1587, the young writer was nearly denied his degree from Cambridge amid rumours he had travelled to Catholic seminaries abroad – a potentially treasonous act. But the privy council intervened, saying he had been “employed in matters touching the benefit of his country” and had “done Her Majesty good service”.

It was a combination of Marlowe’s access to sensitive information, his provocative writings and reported atheism, that many believe made him a target to a range of people and groups. When he was killed in May 1593, it was while he was on bail to the privy council for alleged heresy and blasphemy.

The circumstances around his stabbing were highly suspicious – his killer, Ingram Frizer, was pardoned less than a month later and no inquest records survive. Frizer and the two other men present (Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley) all had links to the Elizabethan secret service.

Some theories suggest the killing was state-sanctioned; others claim Marlowe’s death was faked and that he escaped abroad, possibly continuing to write under a pseudonym (with a fringe theory even naming him as the true author of Shakespeare’s works).

McDermid said she learned there were “a lot of reasons why you might want to get rid of” Marlowe.

“He held a lot of people’s fates in his hands,” she said. “He kept company with many powerful figures in Elizabeth’s court, some of whom were notorious for opinions that sailed close to the wind. In Elizabethan England, a man – or woman – could be executed for opinions that were open to interpretation as heresy.

“For example, Marlowe’s fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, who was also a professional scribe, was arrested and tortured for possessing material the authorities considered heretical, even though he swore he was simply doing a paid job. To get himself off the hook, Kyd claimed he’d been copying Marlowe’s words; an unlikely excuse in respect of a man who had written half a dozen plays and a substantial body of poetry!”

McDermid said the popular version of Marlowe’s death was evidently not true. “For a start it wasn’t a tavern, it was a private house owned by a woman called Eleanor Bull, who was related by marriage to one of Elizabeth’s other spy masters,” she said.

But the writer does not place much stock in the other theories about his death, including that it was a political killing. “I find this unsatisfactory,” she said.

“If his supposed enemies had wanted Marlowe out of the way, they’d have had no need of such an elaborate set-up. He was riding alone daily between Thomas Walsingham’s home in Scadbury to the privy council in Nonsuch Palace to keep the conditions of his bail – a distance of almost 18 miles through rural countryside with dozens of opportunities for an anonymous ambush and assassination.”

She added: “These were not backstreet thugs he was dealing with, they were clever and strategic men of power. It would have been well within their capabilities to get rid of Marlowe and make it look like a street brawl, or knock him out and tip him unconscious into the Thames. There would have been no need to potentially implicate anyone connected with either the Walsingham family or Marlowe’s other powerful connections.”

McDermid has been writing thrillers for more than 30 years, selling more than 19m copies worldwide and winning numerous awards. Script-in-hand readings of And Midnight Never Come will take place at Pitlochry festival theatre and the Edinburgh international book festival on 18and 19 August.

She said the play was framed by Marlowe’s final day, and paid tribute to the late writer’s extravagance.

“Marlowe was a pretty wild guy in lots of respects. He was flamboyant, he was a bit of a jack the lad. He’d get his sword out without much provocation. And he was clearly very sexy,” she said.

Meryl Streep is in talks to play Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia film, according to reports. According to Nexus Point News, and confirmed by Deadline Streep, 75, is being lined up to star in Netflix’s film, which will be adapted from The Magician’s Nephew – the sixth of CS Lewis Narnia series of novels, but the first in chronological terms.

In the Narnia books, Aslan is a dignified and quasi-omniscient lion, generally seen to be male and usually interpreted as an allegory for Jesus. The Magician’s Nephew centres on two children, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, who discover the magical world through Digory’s uncle Andrew. Daniel Craig is also in talks for the film, with speculation rising that he will play the uncle. Charli XCX is also in line for a role, rumoured to be Jadis, the White Witch.

The film will be Gerwig’s first since megahit Barbie, which earned over $1.4bn at the global box office. She signed on as part of Netflix’s 2018 optioning of Lewis’s series in 2020; the film will be screened globally in Imax in Thanksgiving 2026 before moving to streaming.

Streep previously appeared in in another of Gerwig’s takes on a classic of children’s literature: the 2019 version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The actor has not appeared on the big screen since her role in 2021’s Don’t Look Up, but is rumoured to be returning to make a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada later this year.

Ronald Pickup and David Suchet are among the actors who have voiced Aslan in celebrated BBC TV and radio productions of The Chronicles of Narnia, while Liam Neeson took the role in the three Narnia films made between 2005 and 2010.

Other films which have reimagined deities as female include Dogma (Alanis Morrissette), The Shack (Octavia Spencer) and the upcoming Jesus Christ Superstar movie (Cynthia Erivo). Meanwhile Whoopi Goldberg has played God twice, in Little Bit of Heaven and It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas.

NIMH-funded study used universal screening, risk assessment, and safety planning to reduce suicide attempts among adult primary care patients

December 30, 2024
• Research Highlight

Suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States and a major public health concern. Previous research has shown that identifying and helping people at risk for suicide during regular care visits can help prevent it. Primary care clinics are particularly important in this regard, as research has shown that over 40% of people who died by suicide  were seen in this setting in the month before their death.