The three European productions hosted by The Urban Theatre Project in November should have targeted much more proactively a teenage audience or even younger (in the case of Handle with Care). Their core subjects—predatorial exercise of power over women, ethnic discrimination, and inhibitions among strangers—concern older citizens equally, but the practices that they employed would have engaged youth with greater efficacy over their one-hour durations.
Drawing on interviews of young people in Norway and Malaysia as well as the personal experiences of co-writers Karen Houge, David Tann and Bella Rahim, Didn’t Know That About You describes orgiastic house-party raves where peer pressure may lead to sexual assault. From an introductory razzmatazz of computer FX projections emerges Zeus (Kristoffer Egset), abusing his patriarchal authority over Athena (Rahim) and Aphrodite (Houge). This divine analogy works well as a frame, but director Elisabet Topp may want to reassess the health dangers in flu season (or any other season, for that matter) of having the royal grape passed from teeth to teeth among the seated congregation. Or perhaps the acquiescing Kolkatans consider themselves immune to all bugs?
Soky’s modus operandi became apparent on the solo Dreamgirl, where the prologue featured a skimpily-clad cabaret dancer (Houge) to expose an extreme of so-called “civilized” decadence, which rapidly changed into an opposite, the racist traumas faced by boat refugees entering Europe. Thus, Soky grabs spectators with spectacular opening sequences before examining ground realities: here, trusting strangers. It came as a shock to me that many viewers fell in line with Houge’s question of whom to throw off the boat, when the obvious humanist answer is not to sacrifice anyone but to find an alternative, like tossing wood and baggage out to reduce the deadweight.
Ontroerend Goed’s publicity for Handle with Care (co-presented by Arts Forward) claims that it “gives you complete control” to create a unique immersive event every time, the people present shaping it through spontaneous improvisation. This, too, places emphasis on strangers coming together, a concept encouraging free audience participation that goes back to the anything-goes 1960s. However, the group does not actually leave everything to chance, because they dispatch to each venue a box containing props and fairly detailed instructions, even including scene captions. Consequently, a basic structure pre-exists. Activities such as the placing of timeline cards, assembling jigsaw-puzzle pieces and “Eight minutes of chaos” made a friend of mine term them “party games”, substantiating my comment at the beginning of this review that youngsters, by nature more uninhibited, form the ideal cohort for it to succeed.
(4 December 2025)