EVENT: LET’S PLAY I AM OLD AND TIRED (OCTOBER 28—29 2026, BERLIN, GERMANY)
Let’s Play I Am Old and Tired, Total Refusal & Theater im Bahnhof
HAU3, Tempelhofer Ufer 10, 10963 Berlin
Wednesday 28 October 2026, 19:00, and Thursday 29 October, 20:00. German and English
Tickets: €15, reduced €9
The first performance will be followed by a German-language artist talk with Heimo Lattner, co-editor of Teslokratie: Ideologien des Tech-Kapitalismus
Total Refusal and Graz’s Theater im Bahnhof will present Let’s Play I Am Old and Tired at Berlin’s HAU Hebbel am Ufer on 28–29 October 2026. The live gaming performance follows an ageing protagonist who has lost interest in heroic adventure and wants to withdraw to Aurora Basin, a lake in Red Dead Redemption 2. His ambition is to find somewhere the demands will stop.
First presented in Graz in September 2025, the production appeared at the city’s Digithalia festival on 27 March 2026. The HAU engagement brings this collaboration between machinima artists and theatre makers to Berlin.
Under Monika Klengel’s direction, the performers use several gaming laptops to produce a film in real time before an audience. Johanna Hierzegger handles live editing and set design, while RCPisAwesome supplies the modifications to the game. This arrangement extends machinima, the practice of making moving images within videogame environments, into a performance whose construction shares the audience’s time. Its premise also contains a practical irony: a character’s desire to stop any action and withdraw from the world depends on the coordinated activity of the people operating his world.
Theater im Bahnhof brings a substantial history of collective production to the collaboration. Founded in Graz in 1989, the company develops original work for theatres and public spaces, often examining Austrian identity through everyday life and popular culture.
The artists explicitly invoke Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). A cabin beside a simulated lake offers a contemporary setting for the desire to leave society behind. Yet the proposed refuge belongs to a commercial entertainment system, and its apparent seclusion depends on software. The premise invites a reading of escapism as a compromised necessity: the exhausted subject seeks relief through the same consumer culture that keeps soliciting attention. Retirement from the quest becomes a way of testing how much freedom a game permits beyond its incentives.
For Total Refusal, the pseudo-Marxist collective founded in 2018, such departures from prescribed play have long provided material for political inquiry.
Hardly Working (2022) studies the repetitive labour of non-player characters, the digital extras who sustain the appearance of an inhabited world. Their routines make work visible as an obligation that can persist without meaningful change. The tired protagonist of the HAU production introduces a related concern: the expectation that a character will always remain willing to act.
Live performance already has an established place in the collective’s practice.
Total Refusal, Sons and True Sons, 2024. Video source: Total Refusal
Sons and True Sons (2024), produced by Donaufestival in collaboration with STRP Festival, uses Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 to examine the digital manosphere and the political fantasies surrounding the 2021 assault on the US Capitol.
Their recent film World at Stake (2025) turns to sports simulations. A football team plays against itself, while a golfer cannot complete the expected action. Around them, programmed spectators lack the capacity to intervene. The film’s treatment of political helplessness provides a productive comparison with Let’s Play I Am Old and Tired: withdrawal can express a refusal to comply, but it can also leave the surrounding order intact. The theatrical collaboration gives that uncertainty a protagonist who wants relief. World at Stake received an Honorary Mention in the New Animation Art category at Prix Ars Electronica 2025. Its subsequent circulation includes the Milan Machinima Festival in March 2026 and a Total Refusal programme at Filmoteca UNAM’s El Aleph festival in Mexico City on 7 May.
The collective’s current activities also extend beyond screenings. Its work appears in The Transparent Factory, curated by Marc Villanueva Mir at the Muxart Space for Contemporary Art and Creation in Martorell, from 2 October 2026 to 10 January 2027. New Media Week in Katowice programmed a practical workshop with Total Refusal on 4 October, pairing game appropriation with discussion of shared authorship and democratic decision-making. These contexts connect the finished films with the working methods through which the group redirects commercial software.
HAU offers an institutional context for this combination of digital practice and live performance. Directed by Annemie Vanackere since 2012, the Berlin production house supports international work alongside the independent performing arts scene. Its HAU4 platform, announced for the 2020–21 season, commissions projects specifically for online environments and maintains an ongoing programme concerned with gaming and technological power.
The venue’s 2026–27 season statement, Countering Exhaustion, makes the connection more explicit. HAU links contemporary fatigue to authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic life, arguing for artistic work that can develop beyond immediate commercial usefulness. Within this programme, Total Refusal and Theater im Bahnhof introduce an unresolved political difficulty: the need to rest can be urgent even when the conditions producing exhaustion demand a collective response.
The promise of a cabin at Aurora Basin leaves open how an individual retreat might relate to action beyond it.