Arthur Decock & Lasse Geudens // PLAY_FINAL (premiere)

What if your very last attempt to make theater becomes the only performance you ever really wanted to make? PLAY_FINAL is as hilarious as it is desperate, a swan song for a career that never began, and which therefore explodes into a universal search for meaning in a world that is on the verge of collapse. It begins with a painfully recognizable observation: theater maker Arthur Decock makes peace with the fact that his career is going nowhere. After years of trying, talking, and writing without result, he decides to call it quits with a final bang. Together with musician and all-round artist Lasse Geudens, he makes a performance about not trying anymore, a conscious farewell to the arts. The plan: throw all theater conventions together and show how banal it can all be when bombs are flying at us in the background of the world. But what begins as a personal indictment soon derails into something much larger. The attempt to stop fails and gives way to a feverish, unstoppable urge to play. The stage becomes an arena where the frustration is no longer personal but existential. In a bombardment of live music, disturbing projections, absurd humor, and raw poetry, all theatrical registers are pulled out and immediately broken down again. PLAY_FINAL is the honest and confrontational story of the struggling artist, which bursts open into a multimedia, post-dramatic trip about the question of whether art still makes sense when the bombs fall. A performance that embraces giving up and finds a reason in that very thing to go all out one more time. An as desperate as hopeful salute to the audience and a manifesto for continuing to play, against better judgment.