Though hard-hitting and well-intentioned, this mixture of static holograms and verbatim stories of the harm caused by UK government austerity programmes is flawed and troubling. Small groups of audience members wearing virtual reality headsets are invited to view squalid tableaux of disabled, disturbed or otherwise disadvantaged people – in hospital beds, barefoot under coverless duvets, collapsed in the street – while family members narrate how they suffered and died under labyrinthine benefits assessments.
You can’t hear all of the eight featured case studies in the 35-minute visiting slot, and it’s up to you how much or little of each you listen to. Doubtless this is part of the point that director Sacha Wares and her co-creator of this experience, John Pring of the Disability News Service, are making. We choose to pay attention to human suffering, to ignore it, or to dismiss those in need as “scroungers”.
But the framing of these people as mute, inert exhibits has a distancing effect that goes beyond the exposure of our complicity in their plight. Ditto the clunky VR imagery and equipment, which remains the antithesis of a live theatrical experience, and which gives the “cast” (there’s no acting involved, obviously) a plasticized look as if they’ve been generated by computer. The late subjects can’t speak for themselves, of course, but it’s odd that we’re only given their full names, and those telling their stories, at the end.
The very name, Museum of Austerity, suggests that we’re dealing with a historic issue, but as a set of information boards at the entrance tells us, the current Labour government is effectively continuing the cruel and unusual policies concocted by coalition and Tory regimes. By mounting this earnest, heartfelt, heartbreaking artwork at a time when most people are looking for warmth and escapism, I suspect Wares and Pring will be preaching to a very small number of the converted.
The stories themselves are wrenchingly sad. David, a former soldier in the Royal Signals who then worked for BT, became a carer for his demented mother and was made homeless when she died. He couldn’t cope with a complicated claims process due to brain fog brought on by diabetes. Moira, a nurse, had lung cancer and complex needs after being attacked with a hammer by her partner. Her benefits were retrospectively approved after she choked to death on her own vomit. Errol, who had been sectioned, and Mark, who had anorexia and agoraphobia, both died alone, apparently starved. Errol’s daughter-in-law Alison recalls the “smell of death” in his room, her voice breaking.
“I thought what’d happened was a mistake in the system,” Moira’s daughter Nichole says over our headsets. “I didn’t realise this WAS the system.” And certainly it seems the process of claiming disability payments was made intentionally difficult by the Department of Work and Pensions to facilitate cuts in the welfare budget from 2010 onwards. This was made worse when Disability Living Allowance was replaced by Personal Independence Payments in 2012, the assessment of which was outsourced to the likes of Capita and Atos, who regularly pronounced physically and mentally incapable people as "fit to work", ignored evidence and mislaid correspondence.
The actions of these firms come across as soulless at best, criminally incompetent at worst: in 2015, one of the information boards tells us, welfare tests were linked to 590 suicides in the UK. Politicians, by comparison, get off lightly. Snatches of debate from the House of Commons precede each story, but none of the ministers speaking is named or particularly shamed. Boris Johnson, easily identifiable of course, sounds almost statesmanlike in September 2019, pledging £106m to the DWP to improve matters in the light of “tragic cases”. Nothing has changed since then, it seems. And this often self-defeating theatrical installation will surely only highlight that fact to a small and already-sympathetic audience.
To 16 Jan, youngvic.org.
