Theatre review
Handle With Care is a modest effort at unrehearsed storytelling with a box as the director
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A Singapore audience trying out Ontroerend Goed’s Handle With Care.
PHOTO: ESPLANADE – THEATRES ON THE BAY
- Handle With Care is an unrehearsed, audience-driven theatre piece centred on a box with instructions.
- The show lacks professional actors and traditional theatre elements, resulting in a modest experience that mimics a group board game.
- While innovative and economical, the production proves meaningful theatre needs more.
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Handle With Care
Ontroerend Goed
Esplanade Theatre Studio
Aug 7, 8pm
One might be forgiven for going away from this show thinking that its title Handle With Care is a bit ironic.
By the end of the night, the box that is at the centre of this unusual production will have been ruthlessly smashed, stepped on and slammed against seat railings. There will have been lots of reading of instructions, awkward music emitting from phones and the invoking of traces from Handle With Care performances elsewhere.
These are left by sets of audiences from Sweden to Hong Kong to Australia, who took identical prompts from their boxes and put their own spin on it, providing “emotional” moments the show will feed on as somehow illuminating of people’s shared humanity.
Handle With Care is Belgian theatre group Ontroerend Goed’s radical reimagination of what theatre can be, stripped of directors, professional actors, set, lighting and other accoutrements, save a box with instructions that still aim for story arc and revelation.
Its works are usually fringe fare, so adjust expectations accordingly. It succeeds insofar as things still happen with a recognisable build-up, climax and denouement, but that is maybe where the interest ends.
It is a minor miracle that it gets pulled off.
But it does not come close to being as fun as the group’s high-stakes chips game £¥€$ (LIES), brought to the Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2023. That was both a hoot and one of the clearest explanations of why and how markets crash.
Opening with the sole box on the ground, Handle With Care begins the moment somebody from the audience steps forward to read the first instruction. In this show, a ready audience familiar with the conceit took no time to start, and a series of tasks is set out that involves the audience members helping one another.
The more proactive ones take on roles explicitly directed at those “who will get things done”. Others might sit back, but everyone will have to do at least one activity. It is sometimes like playing a very elaborate board game at an orientation camp.
This one fulfils people’s hidden desires to take the stage, and shows how a group of strangers can come together to make unrehearsed, mediocre theatre.
It is an economical flex on Ontroerend Goed’s part, but also goes to show that for anything more than trite distraction, people would need much, much more than a box.
Book It/Handle With Care
Where: Various venues at The Esplanade, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: Sept 3, 8pm; Sept 5, 2pm and 5pm; Sept 6, 2pm and 5pm
Admission: $35 and $30 (concession)
Info: str.sg/ot6qC
