Ontroerend Goed's Handle with Care to appear at Edinburgh Fringe
- Immersive Rumours
- Jul 18
- 2 min read
Ontroerend Goed isn’t coming this year. But their box will be there. Their audience takes the stage in Handle with Care.
Photo: Joëlle Desmet
Eight-time Fringe First winners Ontroerend Goed return to the Fringe this August. Only this time, they won’t be present. Handle with Care is a show in a box that is entirely performed by the audience. No actors, no technicians – just a box, and you.
The show started from two questions: How do you connect with people you will never meet, and how can we care for those who come after us? Ontroerend Goed guides the audience through the performance with instructions, letters, questions, and objects. Don’t expect pre-made scenes or a script that precisely dictates when to enter and exit. The performance emerges from the personal input of the audience and is therefore unique each time.
Handle with Care has been touring since October 2025, and has since been unboxed and performed over 230 times, in 10 languages and in 16 different countries.
Director Alexander Devriendt said:
This project is part of a trilogy that I call 'An Hour Spent With Others'. After Funeral, where we explore new mourning rituals, and Thanks for Being Here, an ode to the audience, we entrust the entire performance to the spectators in Handle with Care. This time we fully embrace the collective aspect of that experience: the communal, the connection. And it's wonderful that there's no one there to see it, except the audience themselves.
Belgian theatre-performance-group Ontroerend Goed has established a long track record at Edinburgh Fringe. After their international breakthrough with The Smile Off Your Face in 2007, they have been awarded several Fringe First, Herald Angel and Total Theatre Awards.
With their often immersive performances, they invite the audience not only to watch but also to become part of the show: spectators as voters who eliminate actors, one-on-one theatre, the audience at the controls of the financial system, or now as main characters in a show in a box. Ontroerend Goed constantly seeks unpredictability, in form and content.
Ontroerend Goed tours worldwide and creates remakes of their productions in other languages: versions exist in French, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Kazakh, among others. Over the past 25 years, the company has been awarded numerous prizes at national and international festivals.
Ontroerend Goed's Handle with Care runs at Studio at ZOO Southside (Venue 82) from 24th to 30th August 2026 at 13:30. For more information and to book tickets, visit edfringe.com
