COLAB Theatre is an award winning theatre company which established itself back in 2012. Since then, they have made cutting edge productions mixed with authentic immersive theatre styles to create an experience, where audiences can delve as deep as they wish in this new era of entertainment. 

COLAB have a catalogue of past experiences which show they have a fantastic history in the immersive world. Hosting in numerous buildings across London with different themes from horror to spy, they use knowledge combined with experience to tailor a unique experience during each one of these stories. 

Crooks 1926 is the latest experience that is being hosted by COLAB, which has ran on selected dates in the evenings in London for the last few months. We took a step into their world one Thursday evening…

The experience can host around 30 – 40 guests per each evening show, lasting around 3 hours. This is the biggest crowd we’ve been in during an immersive production and theatre performance, so it was interesting to see how it came together. 

Upon entry, they provided you with a stamp. The stamp put you into a different faction to be involved in the story. With three different factions, we were a part of the Dockyard workers. Whilst at the start this made very little sense, it all becomes apparent later during the experience.

As we try to keep our experience as spoiler free as possible and hide key details, we won’t go into the plot and key points of the story. With this said, the faction groups you have joined end up being different parts of the overall story. This splits the bigger group up into a handful of smaller groups that complete different tasks that play a part in the main story. This could be from fixing a horse race to organising a safe house robbery. 

Whilst you can’t experience each and every activity, the experience is clever to incorporate really exciting and different tasks for each group, which all seemed fun and kept you distracted.  

Overall, COLAB Theatre with Crooks 1926 have created a mind blowing three hour experience, putting you right in the middle of the story. It was incredibly detailed, mischievous and a fun night out. We have not experienced an immersive theatre production with such a large group but this did not ruin or affect the performance at all. If anything, it made it better and used all the splitting techniques, in depth personal storylines to their advantage. For all the actors to play their characters and sometimes multiple characters flawlessly throughout the 3 hours is a massive achievement. Especially when the responses from each evening are completely different, depending on the group and interaction. 

Crooks 1926 is nearly over with only a handful of tickets left in December. We highly recommend grabbing one of these last remaining tickets whilst you can. Fear not if you are reading this too late or the timings don’t work out for you, as in January their new experience known as Viper Squad comes to life! 

We would like to say a huge thank you to the team for their incredible performance on the evening and making us feel welcome. We also like to thank them for providing tickets for us to experience this immersive theatre production and allowing us to take exclusive images and write a review. 

More information can be found on the COLAB website and socials and until the next experience, we cannot wait to be back in the middle of the action!