The latest from immersive theatre specialistrs COLAB is an escape room-style show set in a post-apocalyptic future. A substance called The Darkness has ravaged the world – the secrets of the bunker hold the key to survival, but the audience needs to master them first. The show is designed and created by COLAB co-artistic director Bertie Watkins.
What is immersive theatre? A glib buzzword? A specific description of a specific type of theatre? A phrase that has become so diluted that it’s lost all meaning? Whether you call it immersive, interactive or site-specific, London is bursting with plays and experiences which welcome you into a real-life adventure that you can wander around and play the hero in.
London's best immersive shows at a glance:
- Best for dinner theatre: Faulty Towers the Dining Experience, President Hotel
- Best for Trekkies: Bridge Command, Vauxhall Arches
- Coolest: Lander 23, Carriageworks
- Best for kids: Fireside Tales, Punchdrunk Enrichment Stores
- Best for thrillseekers: Squid Game: The Experience, ImmerseLDN
I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and I have run the immersive gamut, from a show where I had to take my clothes off in a darkened shipping container, to successfully bagging tickets to the six-hour Punchdrunk odyssey there were only ever a couple of hundred tickets for, to quite a lot of theatre productions where the set goes into the audience a bit and apparently that counts as immersive.
There is a lot of immersive work in London, some of which is definitely theatre, some of which definitely isn’t, some of which is borderline, some of which is but doesn’t want to say it is because some some people are just horrified of the word ‘theatre’.
This page has been around for a while now and gone through various schools of thought, but the one we’ve settled on for now is that the main list compiles every major show in London that could reasonably be described as ‘immersive theatre’, while the bottom list compiles a few of our favouite immersive shows thet you probably wouldn’t describe as theatre though it is, naturally a blurry line.
Whatever the case you can mostly only really decide what most of these shows are if you go and do them… prepare to immerse yourself.
