An experiment in live theatrical co-creation that asks what happens when theatre lets go of rehearsal, control and certainty.

Duration: 80 min

There is something inherently awkward about getting to know someone for the first time. You stumble over your words, try on different versions of yourself, wonder what the other person is thinking, and slowly, if you are lucky, find a rhythm together. Gangguan! Theatre’s Getting To Know You takes that awkwardness and makes it its theatrical engine.

Written by Edward Eng and co-directed by Eng and Tan Hui Er, this 80-minute experiment sees a new pair of actors perform the play each night without having seen the script beforehand. Neither actor has rehearsed with the other, or at all, really. Each receives a script containing only their own lines and stage directions, with their scene partner’s dialogue redacted. There are warm-ups and exercises beforehand, but what happens onstage remains largely undiscovered in real time. What the audience sees is, quite literally, two people getting to know a play, each other and the mechanics of performance at the same time.

The production’s set establishes an appropriately strange atmosphere for this experiment. Staged in the relatively cosy Black Box at Goodman Arts Centre, the space has been dressed to look like the aftermath of a celebration: red curtains frame either side of the stage, streamers and fold-out stars hang overhead, while confetti and balloons are scattered across the floor. It feels festive but slightly forlorn, like the remains of a party after everyone has gone home, or a celebration waiting for something to happen. As Julie Andrews’ almost comically on-the-nose “Getting To Know You” plays, the actors enter and pick up their scripts. The visual language of the set introduces one of the production’s central tensions from the outset: this is a space designed to suggest celebration, romance and connection, even as the people inhabiting it have no idea what is going to happen next.

That awkwardness soon becomes a strange kind of theatrical intimacy. At first, it is almost the point. The actors visibly find their feet: testing voices, working out their characters, figuring out where to stand and how to respond to someone whose lines they cannot see. Gradually, though, something shifts. They begin to settle into the rhythm of the scene, and you can see them becoming more comfortable with each other. Towards the end though, that process becomes almost genuinely affecting. There is a sense that the actors have finally found one another, and their increasing physical closeness begins to feel less prescriptive and more like something they have genuinely discovered over the course of the experiment. At times, the experiment seems to produce exactly what it promises: an authentic connection emerging from uncertainty.

The story follows Eri and Alex, who encounter each other in a nightclub on New Year’s Eve after years apart. It is a familiar romantic setup, circling questions of coincidence, fate, memory and whether two people might find their way back to each other. But the dialogue can sometimes feel less like realistic conversation and more like philosophical musing: polished thoughts about love and connection delivered as lines rather than discovered through the messy rhythms of an actual conversation. At times, it feels like an idealised version of what people might say in a nightclub rather than the strange, awkward, sometimes banal things people actually say when they are trying to reconnect.

This tension between the experiment and the play itself is what makes Getting To Know You so fascinating, and, at times, frustrating. The experiment is most compelling when it happens between the actors rather than within the story. Watching two people genuinely work out how to respond to each other can be more absorbing than watching fictional characters articulate ideas about connection.

There is also an interesting question lurking beneath the production: what does the absence of rehearsal actually tell us about the necessity of rehearsal and direction? Watching the actors discover the play in real time can make you appreciate the freedom of not knowing what comes next. But it can also make visible what rehearsal and direction are usually there to provide. Rehearsal does not simply exist to make actors repeat something until it becomes polished. It can give a play shape, allow discoveries to accumulate, and create enough trust for actors to move beyond the words on the page.

As such, Getting To Know You seems caught between these two possibilities. On one hand, it wants to strip theatre back to something pure, immediate and unpredictable: people encountering words, each other and an audience for the first time. On the other, it is still asking those people to carry a scripted romantic drama with its own demands of character, pacing and emotional development. At times, those impulses pull the production in different directions. By the end, the intimacy that has been built up is also disrupted by a narrated ending, leaving the connection that had just emerged feeling strangely unresolved.

Perhaps this is why the experiment feels purer when the plot gets out of the way. There are moments when the mechanics of the production become the drama. The audience watches actors make decisions, recover from uncertainty and gradually establish a shared physical language. The possibility of failure is always present, and that gives even small gestures a certain charge.

The audience, too, is pulled into that uncertainty through a degree of participation. Some are given tasks, such as reading passages of narration; others are spontaneously invited to join in on the dancefloor. At other times, a Polaroid camera gets thrown into the mix. At their best, these interventions create moments of wonderfully messy participation. An audience member struggling through a passage or trying to work out the mechanics of a camera can be unexpectedly funny because the awkwardness is real, and you feel that warmth in the room. But some interventions feel more inserted than integrated, particularly the longer passages of audience-read narration, which can interrupt rather than deepen the flow. The messiness is compelling when it feels like part of the experiment; less so when it feels like another device being layered onto it.

The sound and lighting are more successfully integrated into this uncertainty. Rather than simply supporting a fixed performance, they respond to each new pairing, helping establish the nightclub atmosphere and directing attention as the action shifts between actors and audience. The technical elements become part of the same game of responding to what is happening, rather than imposing a single predetermined version of the show.

And perhaps that is what makes the production worth engaging with, even when it does not entirely work as a play. There is something admirable about a group being willing to relinquish control and accept the possibility of an imperfect performance. Getting To Know You does not always produce a satisfying dramatic experience, but it does create the conditions for something more elusive: the possibility that two people who have never performed together might find a rhythm that could not have been fully planned in advance.

Watching actors slowly find their footing can remind us why rehearsal matters. Watching them reach for one another can remind us what direction and collaboration make possible. And watching a fleeting moment of genuine connection disappear can make us wonder whether spontaneity alone is enough to sustain a story. The production does not quite resolve that contradiction, but there is value in seeing theatre-makers take the risk of asking the question in the first place. After all, getting to know someone is never a perfectly controlled process. You stumble, misread, adjust, pull closer and sometimes lose the rhythm just when you think you have found it.

The production ultimately asks whether connection can be engineered. Can you create enough rules, structures and safety for something spontaneous and human to emerge? Or does the very attempt to manufacture coincidence and intimacy risk making it feel artificial? There is no definitive answer, because there is no definitive version of the show. Every night produces a different encounter, and some will inevitably be more successful than others. That uncertainty is, after all, precisely the point.

Photo Credit: Gangguan! Theatre

Getting To Know You plays from 10th to 13th September 2026 at the Goodman Arts Centre Black Box. Tickets available from BookMyShow

Cast for 10 September: Noorlinah Mohamed, Karen Tan
Cast for 11 September: Risa Ann Wong, Xuan Ong
Cast for 12 September: Sharda Harrison, Lian Sutton
Cast for 13 September: Izzul Irfan, Vanessa Toh