It is impossible to look away from the shimmering figures that emerge in what appears at first to be an empty room. And that is the point.
Through a headset donned at the entrance of Museum of Austerity, which opened at the Home theatre in Manchester on Wednesday, holograms of people glow in eerie augmented reality. Approaching them, they feel real and touchable but also ghostly and ephemeral, which they are: they are real people who died when our societal safety net did not catch them.
“It’s a really angry piece of work,” the director, Sacha Wares, said.
Though the 3D holograms are played by actors, each of their stories is narrated by a real family member of the person who died after cruel treatment at the hands of the Department for Work and Pensions’ harsh and punitive disability benefits system. It is juxtaposed with audio from the House of Commons in which politicians orate on how it is too generous and rife with fraudulent claims.
This was a culture that had become normalised over more than a decade of austerity, said Wares, who worked with the disability journalist John Pring on finding and telling the stories in a blend of theatre, history, art and technology. “But it is not normal that the welfare system that is supposed to keep you alive does the exact opposite,” she added.
One of the most powerful images from Museum of Austerity is that of Errol Graham, a 57-year-old grandfather who died emaciated in his bed when his benefits were stopped.
He weighed 28.5kg (4st 7lb) when his body was discovered by bailiffs who had broken down his front door to evict him for non-payment of rent.
When we read about Graham online, we see photos of him from his younger years surrounded by football trophies. Nobody sees the reality of what happened to him until this exhibition, where we listen to his daughter-in-law tell us about him and what led to what we can see: a prone, dead figure on the ground partly hidden by a duvet.
“The distance between those who know what that ‘war on the poor’ or ‘war on welfare’ has been like, and the ones who don’t, is actually vast and there’s no imagery really,” said the award-winning director, whose daughter has a disability.
It is the definition of unflinching, which is perhaps why Wares struggled to find a theatre that would put it on, despite its innovative tech – never before has 3D hologram technology been used to create figures that can be walked around and scrutinised as though they were real people.
“As a theatre director I’ve been fortunate because usually when I want to make something there’s a home for it and I can get it made,” she said. “It’s been really striking with this piece of work that that’s not been the case. And you wonder: is that a change in the confidence of the sector to be political?”
Wares has a history of making political theatre, having directed the play Guantanamo in 2004, which transferred to the West End and then had a spell in New York, but the outrage and responsibility she noticed from the theatre community during that production seemed curiously absent now, she said.
It is true that productions as absolutely stark as Museum of Austerity are hard to find in London’s top theatres. While exceptions exist in the form of Grenfell, the National Theatre production at the Dorfman that was in some ways a work of activism, the trend of the past decade across the West End has been for popular stories adapted from other mediums containing a hint of a message.
Despite this, the production has already gained plaudits: Museum of Austerity was nominated for best digital innovation at the UK Theatre awards, previewed at the London film festival in 2021 and won International Documentary Festival Amsterdam’s best immersive production in 2021.
Wares said: “There are many stories that we prefer not to see, not to hear about, not to happen, but that’s not a good enough excuse for not making them. The harder they are to contemplate, the more they need to be made.”
The Museum of Austerity installation, an English Touring Theatre (ETT) co-production with National Theatre Immersive Storytelling Studio and Trial & Error Studio, will be at Home Manchester from 8 to 11 November 2023. Each session lasts 45 minutes, running 11.30am–9.15pm, Wednesday to Saturday.
