In Old Age, a text by J.M. Vieira Mendes, the actors, before starting, have already retired. People with pasts, showing wrinkles where we can’t see them. The nearest horizon is death, but melancholy is comedy and despair is laughter. In this play the plot is the pretext to thicken the “Who am I?” or “What does it mean to reach the old age?” Or even “Do I say I am old because I am old or am I old because I say I am old?”

From this text, Teatro Praga came to a show in which its old age is put to test. How will it be in 40 years? Speculating the answer adds mater to a closed concept.

Old Age is time and elderness, knowledge and forgetfulness, arthrosis and pilates. But it is also today and was yesterday. It’s a construction to do with known words. An inevitability to fulfill. A reinvention within the invention. A communication in hiccups. It is, ultimately, the possibility to say, with today’s bodies and the future’s hair: Old Age is here and today.

This show doesn’t inaugurate a new age. It merely continues. We are all in the same story. We are all in the same boat.

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Text | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Diogo Lopes, J.M. Vieira Mendes, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim
Cast | Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Diogo Lopes, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Set design | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes
Photography | Susana Pomba
Production | Elisabete Fragoso, Catarina Mendes
Co-production | Teatro Viriato, Teatro Praga

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Length | 55min
M/12