Project Detail

Museum of Austerity

Synopsis

A mixed reality exhibition that preserves memories of public and private events from the austerity era. Combining verbal testimony, original music and ground-breaking volumetric capture, this powerful documentary records stories of disabled benefit claimants who died between 2010-2021, inviting audiences to contemplate close-up the human impact of austerity.

Details

Year
2021
Type of project
Shorts
Running time
30 min
Format
Mixed Reality
Director
Sacha Wares
Producer
Benjamin Jacob Smith, Meg Fozzard
Co-Producer
English Touring Theatre, National Theatre Immersive Storytelling Studio
Executive Producer
Sacha Wares (Trial and Error Studios ), Sophie Scull (ETT), Richard Twyman (ETT), Toby Coffey (National Theatre Immersive storytelling studio)
Production Designer
Miriam Buether
Sound
Gareth Fry
Composer
Adrian Lee
Principal cast
Shango Baku, Jenny Bolt, Gerard McDermott, Katie Matsell, Zoe Matthews, S.J. O’Kane, Lindy Pieri, Elliot Pritchard, Naima Swaleh
Specialist Advisor & Co-Editor
John Pring
Composer
Adrian Lee
Costume & Installation Designer
Miriam Buether
Sound Designer
Gareth Fry
Lighting Designer
Prema Mehta
Movement Director
Leon Baugh
Assistant Director
Hana Pascal Keegan
Casting Director
Amy Ball
Costume Supervisor & Stage Manager
Shannon Martin
Stage Manager
Alice Wood
Costume Supervisor
Kinnetia Isidore
Stage Manager
Shane Thom
Dog Handler
Robert Stuhldreer
Singers
Tim Jones & Jenni Roditi
All Seeing Eye
XR Developer: Clarice Hilton
All Seeing Eye
XR Developer: Robin North
All Seeing Eye
Technical Lead: Ollie Lindsey
All Seeing Eye
Technical Support: Roderick Morgan

Categories

Production Status

Production Company

English Touring Theatre

25 Short Street
London SE1 8LJ

National Theatre Immersive Storytelling Studio

National Theatre
Upper Ground
South Bank
London SE1 9PX

Sales Company

tcoffey@nationaltheatre.org.uk

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

See also

You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.

Allies in Exile Allies in Exile

Director: Hasan Kattan

Year: 2026

For 14 years, Syrian filmmakers Hasan Kattan and Fadi Al-Halabi have journeyed together through war and storytelling. Their bond was forged on the frontlines of revolution where their cameras recorded terror and hope, laughter and heartbreak – moments that defined a generation. Years later, their story takes an unexpected turn. Confined inside a UK asylum hotel, Hasan and Fadi document a new chapter shaped not by bombs, but by waiting, bureaucracy, and exile. Amid rising anti-refugee hostility, they turn the camera inward exploring friendship and displacement and how filming itself becomes an act of survival when the future is so uncertain. Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2026 - World premiere

走 (zǒu) 走 (zǒu)

Director: Hannah Wu

Year: 2025

"A journey through the pages of my mother’s old Chinese-English dictionary, featuring tigers, socialists and roundabouts." An experimental animated short about language, meaning and moving through the world (one drawing at a time). Combining ink drawings on paper with direct animation on 35mm film, various definitions of the Chinese character for ‘walk’ take on meanings in turn literal, historical, personal and abstract.

A girl looking at her phone screen in a dark room The Futora

Director: Yuqing Lin

Year: 2025

An unidentified ghostly entity travels through nocturnal shimmer - A faint and fleeting glow of the night - it is an “egregore”, a collective being formed by unconscious memories. This spectral presence drifts between night towns and children's dreamworlds, navigating fragmented geographies and temporal folds. Inspired by 1980s and 1990s Chinese children's science fiction films like WONDER BOY, the filmmaker reimagines electricity not just as infrastructure, but as a living force - speculating: what if the ghost that once inhabited lightbulbs and circuits is now displaced, scattered across phone screens and the devices of a sleepless global supply chain? In this film, the ghost transforms from a figure of mystical empowerment into a fragmented existence, diffracted, dispersed, and re-coded. Assembling fragmented connections through material and time from light accessory factories in southern China, through the dreams and imagination of children living nearby, and the port town of Grays in eastern England. These peripheral spaces appear to host accidental encounters, yet in reality, they serve as vital nodes in the circulation of low-cost global goods - concealing the shadow infrastructures of globalisation. The light traveler drifts across fragmented geographies, tracing entangled relationships between time, labour, desire, and the more-than-human.