Handle With Care - Edinburgh Fringe 2026

Handle with Care

★★½☆☆

A beautifully engineered box that ultimately asks the audience to do rather more work than it gives them reason to want to.

The idea is considerably more interesting than the event itself.

Belgian company Ontroerend Goed have made a career out of messing with the relationship between performer and audience. Founded in Ghent around director Alexander Devriendt, the company has become something of a Fringe institution, creating participatory works that ask audiences to vote, decide, participate and occasionally take over the machinery of the theatre. Their work has won multiple Fringe First, Herald Angel and Total Theatre Awards.

Handle with Care takes that experiment to its logical extreme.

There are no actors, no technicians and no director. Instead, a box arrives. Inside are objects, instructions and provocations. The audience opens it, follows the prompts, makes decisions, negotiates with one another and collectively creates the performance.

It is a deliciously simple premise: what happens if the artists hand over the entire performance to the audience?

And this is where the work is undeniably clever.

This isn't simply a box of props accompanied by a command to "go and improvise". Ontroerend Goed have carefully designed a theatrical system - the objects, the instructions, the sequence and the rules within which we operate. There is an enormous amount of authorship in the apparent surrender of authorship.

Every performance is different because every audience is different.

The work is also part of Devriendt's An Hour Spent With Others trilogy, following Funeral and Thanks for Being Here, and continues the company's longstanding interest in what happens when theatre acknowledges the actual people in the room rather than asking us to suspend disbelief.

All of which is fascinating.

Unfortunately, this time around, I found the actual experience considerably less so.

The audience is guided through a series of activities intended to create connection, collaboration and a shared theatrical experience. There is an initial thrill in the awkwardness of strangers figuring out what they're supposed to do together. But too quickly, the exercises began to feel like workshop activities rather than theatrical discoveries.

And that distinction matters.

Participation is not inherently theatrical. Collective awkwardness is not necessarily profound. And asking an audience to do something doesn't automatically make that something interesting.

The paradox of Handle with Care is that the company has constructed an extraordinarily sophisticated machine to produce what, for me, was a surprisingly banal experience.

Perhaps that is partly the point. Ontroerend Goed aren't interested in pretending the world outside the theatre doesn't exist. They want us to acknowledge the room, the strangers we're sitting with and the unpredictable social dynamics that emerge between us.

But acknowledging reality isn't the same thing as transforming it.

There were moments when the audience's different personalities and willingness, or unwillingness, to participate became genuinely interesting. Too often I felt I was being asked to complete an exercise designed to demonstrate the possibility of participatory theatre rather than experiencing a piece of theatre that had found something compelling to say through participation.

Which leaves an intriguing question at the heart of the work:

When does audience participation become theatre and when is it simply an exercise?

I admire the audacity of the proposition. I admire the precision of its construction. And I admire a company prepared to keep dismantling the traditional relationship between artist and spectator.

But theatre is ultimately an experience, not a proposition.

For me, Handle with Care was a fascinating conceptual experiment wrapped around an unexpectedly ordinary experience - a beautifully engineered box that ultimately asked me to do rather more work than it gave me reason to want to.

Review by Kate Gaul