SINGAPORE – It is a suspicious package. It is your Taobao parcel. No, it is Belgian experimental theatre company Ontroerend Goed’s latest show.

While audiences worldwide are gorging on flashy immersive gimmicks, Handle With Care is deliberately low-maintenance fare. Zero cast and crew will fly into Singapore when the work plays nine shows from Aug 7 to Sept 6 at the Esplanade as part of the arts centre’s latest Studios season. The single-use “set” fits into a paper crate not much larger than a shoebox, which costs approximately €600 (S$885) to make.

“It’s a completely different way of making theatre and it’s very extreme. We wanted to know if it was possible to create theatre if there were just a box,” says Handle With Care co-creator Samir Veen gleefully over a Zoom call. Since premiering in 2025, the exceedingly portable show has played over 200 times in 16 countries and 10 languages, figures that would otherwise take the company 10 years to reach.

Developing the work was its own form of extremity during the Covid-19 pandemic. Five co-creators sat around a table to read the rulebooks of some 50 board games, trying to figure out how to conjure connection during isolating times. The American fantasy board game Oath, Veen surmises from his reading club, has the best rule book. Handle With Care was born as a cardboard box under Veen’s bed.

There is something theatrical about the figure of the board game designer, Veen says, that made its way into the show. “They slave over every rule in the board game, every letter in the rulebook. They play it a thousand times and change things along the way. They try to make an experience in a box and send it to a board game store. We buy it, put it on the table and then try to figure it out.”

In the Esplanade’s version, up to 45 strangers gather in a room to figure out what happens in this roughly hour-long show. To test how audiences respond to their prompts, Veen’s team conducted about 50 tryouts over three years – that is 10 times more than the usual for their other interactive shows – across the world, from the Netherlands to China. The scale of the performance meant that the gro...