A legacy for those lost to austerity

MUSEUM HOLOGRAMS HIGHLIGHT HARSH REALITY FOR VICTIMS

- Ros Wynne-Jones standing up for you and your family

An actor portrays Errol in one of the holograms

WALKING into a studio space behind a warren of dressing rooms at the Young Vic theatre earlier this month, I saw a ghost.

A young man called Mark Wood, whose terrible, tragic death I wrote about in this column, was sitting on a bench in a brown T-shirt and grey beanie hat, with a sheet and a sleeping bag thrown over his legs, and bin bags of possessions strewn across the floor.

I found myself sitting down on the bench next to him, completely overwhelmed. A life-sized hologram of Mark, played by an actor, appearing via a virtual reality headset a theatre attendant had handed to me, looked anxiously across at me.

Over the headset, the voice of his wonderful mum Jill Gant was playing, telling Mark's heartbreaking story. How her gentle artist son, who had complex mental health problems, starved to death under Tory austerity aged 44, weighing just 5st 8lb.

The Museum of Austerity, a co-production between the English Touring Theatre, Trial and Error Studio and the National Theatre which came to a close this week, was a 35-minute multi-reality experience that came nearest to the truth of anything I have seen or read about the Conservative austerity years.

From 2013-2024, this column, Real Britain, often felt like a coroner's report, as we investigated one austerity death after another - the people starved, damaged and driven to suicide by a brutalised system designed to vilify and impoverish people who needed the support of the welfare state.

And here, in this small white room was a moment to reflect on lives lost. Having told Mark's story so many times, I wasn't prepared for how moving it would be to sit next to him.

Walking towards each hologram, the audience is confronted with the trite, falsely indignant, mendacious statements of the politicians who condemned them.