"On my sixteenth birthday my father erected a fourteen-foot crucifix in our living room…"
Dennis Kelly's Debris is a knife-edge play about a chaotic, dysfunctional childhood told through the fractured memories of a brother and sister. It's raw, relentless, and not for the faint of heart. We thought: what if we could make the audience feel like they were inside those memories?
So we strapped a pair of headphones to every audience member and dragged them into the wreckage.
Debris is live theatre performed in front of you, while a 3D binaural soundscape unfolds directly inside your head. Characters appear behind you. Voices bleed through walls. The score swells from somewhere you can't quite locate. Every performance is live mixed in real time, meaning no two shows are identical — each one its own particular fever dream, shaped by the room, the night, and the hands on the desk.
This isn't just a show. It's an experience that gets under your skin and stays there.
Created in association with the Young Everyman Playhouse.
How We Pulled It Off
The binaural sound for Debris was recorded using a Neumann KU 100 Dummy Head microphone — a device that captures audio the same way human ears do, meaning playback through headphones places sounds with eerie, three-dimensional precision. (The KU 100 was generously lent to us by the National Theatre via the Association of Sound Designers. We tried not to break it.)
Pre-recorded characters and live performers were woven together seamlessly, with cast members wearing wireless mics that fed into a real-time signal chain — their voices processed, effected, and placed spatially as the show unfolded. The QLab session powering the show contained 768 individual cues. Every breath, every crash, every note of Tammy Howarth's original score was accounted for.
Tools used: QLab (768 cues, no pressure) · Neumann KU 100 Dummy Head · Wireless mic system
The Team
Lighting and Production Design — Dylan Howells Sound Design — Fin Claydon Composer — Tammy Howarth Director — Harry Machray Written by — Dennis Kelly
Michael — Dean Gregory · Michelle — Lydia Cashman
