Handle With Care: The Theatre Show Where the Audience Becomes the Performer

Handle With Care Theatre Show

No actors.
No director.
No stage, lights, or rehearsed cues.

At the centre of the room sits a sealed cardboard box. For a few quiet moments, nothing happens. Then someone stands up, walks forward, opens the box — and reads aloud.

Just like that, the performance begins.

This is Handle With Care, an unconventional theatre work by Belgian performance collective Ontroerend Goed, where the audience doesn’t merely watch the show — they are the show.

Theatre Reduced to Its Bare Essentials

Often described as theatre stripped to its essence, Handle With Care replaces trained performers with whoever happens to be present that evening. There are no characters to play and no scripts to memorise beforehand.

Instead, the entire performance unfolds through:

• Written instructions
• Letters and objects hidden inside a box
• The willingness of audience members to step forward — or not

Within minutes, strangers are on their feet, speaking, listening, negotiating roles and completing tasks. Each person’s decision shapes the flow of the evening.

No two performances are ever the same.

A Bengaluru Staging Built on Trust

The show was presented in Bengaluru on December 13 at the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, brought to the city by Aaron Fernandes Entertainment.

For founder and CEO Aaron Fernandes, encountering the piece at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024 was a turning point.

“I was immediately struck by how unfamiliar and necessary the format felt,” he says. “A performance that only exists through audience participation challenges many assumptions we still hold about theatre.”

What stayed with him was the show’s insistence on shared responsibility — a group of strangers collectively holding an experience together.

Participation Without Pressure

Despite its interactive nature, Handle With Care is careful not to coerce.

“Participation is never compulsory,” Aaron emphasises. “People can enter the experience at their own pace, with real agency over how they engage.”

Those who want to observe quietly are just as welcome as those who step forward early. The performance accommodates hesitation, silence and resistance — all of which are part of its design.

Behind the scenes, Ontroerend Goed provides detailed documentation and guidance to presenters, ensuring the integrity of the experience while allowing each local audience to shape its own version.

‘We Are Not Even There’

For Ontroerend Goed’s artistic director Alexander Devriendt, the project emerged from a deceptively simple question: Is it possible to create theatre without performers at all?

The answer, he says, was not about building a clever puzzle.

“We make interactive theatre for people who don’t like interactive theatre,” Devriendt explains. “No one is forced into the spotlight.”

Control is intentionally relinquished. The creators are not present in the room. There is no authority figure guiding the flow.

“That is the scary part,” he admits.

A Temporary Community Forms

As the evening unfolds, something subtle happens. A group of strangers becomes a temporary community — negotiating trust, consent and responsibility in real time.

Who speaks first, who hesitates, who takes the lead — these choices are shaped entirely by the chemistry of that particular room on that particular night.

Even resistance becomes meaningful. Watching from the back, choosing not to act, is also a valid contribution.

Why It Resonates Now

For Aaron Fernandes, the response to Handle With Care across Indian cities suggests a hunger for intimate, high-concept work that asks audiences to slow down and listen to one another.

“It asks people to respond, not consume,” he says. “That feels especially relevant right now.”

In a space where a simple cardboard box can transform silence into shared experience, the future of theatre feels less about spectacle — and more about presence.

Final Thought

Handle With Care does not offer answers. It offers a structure — and hands the rest over to the people in the room.

In doing so, it quietly reminds us that theatre, at its core, has always been about what happens between us.

Related Topics:
Theatre | Culture | Performance Art | Bengaluru Events | Experimental Theatre

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