Let’s play I am old and tired

Total Refusal & Theater im Bahnhof [Österreich]

Exhausted individuals control digital bodies: in video games, avatars almost always lead the life of a social climber who, starting out as an insignificant nobody, learns to dominate the world in the course of the game. Their steel-hard bodies remain eternally young, and they themselves are always motivated. Are these eternally young bodies, which know no decay, no listlessness, and in most cases even no death as an irrevocable end, really inspiring role models? What would be the superpowers of an old, unmotivated, depressed hero who has to fight his way through an excess of stimuli? With ‘Let's play I am old and tired’, Total Refusal and the Theater im Bahnhof create a tired hero live in front of the audience who, as in Henry David Thoreau's novel ‘Walden’, wants to lead a secluded life in the mountains of a video game.

Premiere 2025 Theater im Bahnhof, Graz. As part of NEWSOFFSTYRIA.

In 2025, the Theater im Bahnhof received the Austrian Art Prize in the performing arts category for its work.