An opportunity came in 2015, when another Secret Theatre producer Daniel Burke said his friend had an empty house for sale or rent on Luk Chau, an island off Lamma. The team took a leap of faith and turned the location into the “stage” for their next production, Se7en Deadly Sins, a bleak crime thriller inspired by the 1995 David Fincher film Se7en. Audience members would take a boat to a secret location—the venue was not revealed when tickets were purchased—and interrogate characters involved in a homicide in a haunted house.

Only it didn’t go down the way they expected. The concept was new, and unfamiliar too; one audience member ended up almost calling the cops on an actress who played a beggar for pestering them. Then there was the problem of the island’s remote location: Crawford flew in ten actors from the UK who lived in the mansion, but they had to hike for an hour to get basics like milk and bread, or take a water taxi to Aberdeen for groceries. “That first show made no money and was ridiculous in many ways,” Crawford recalls.

That didn’t stop them. The following year in London, they came up with Hell Hath No Fury from Dusk till Dawn, inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s 1996 film From Dusk till Dawn. It worked well in London, where it was sold out in record time before it opened, so the team took it to Hong Kong and Singapore. In the Hong Kong version, they partnered with Wan Chai cocktail bar Ophelia, removed the speedboats and simplified the production while keeping the theatrics, making it easier to manage for the creative team and more comfortable for guests. “It was a truckload of fun,” Tworney recalls. “It was a crazy kind of vampire thriller. Instead of throwing water balloons to kill vampires, you were shooting holy water out of penis guns—we ordered more than 200 from Taobao.”

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Crawford thinks that when compared to traditional theatre, immersive shows offer that full experience of being transported to a fictional world when actors don’t always deliver scripted performances but “use their imagination to become someone else”. Hamish Campbell, who worked on Crawford’s productions of Great Gatsby, where he played Nick Carroll, Nights at Studio 54, where he played the titular club’s founder Steve Rubell, and Code 2024 in Tai Kwun, where he played a defence lawyer, finds that the fourth wall in traditional theatre evaporates in interactive theatre.

“You’re fully in contact with the audience,” he says. “It’s not only knowing the script inside out, because you’ve got to be ready for whatever the audience is going to throw at you, but also handling the audience in a different way: you’ve got people who are totally game for everything; some try to take the stage; some just don’t like being spoken to when they have a mouthful of steak.

“But when you do it, there’s no better feeling in the world,” he says. “Everyone here is along for the ride and loving it.”

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At Secret Theatre’s most recent show Nights at Studio 54, where Crawford turned The Peninsula’s Felix into the famous Manhattan nightclub, guests were seen taking photos with Andy Warhol, dancing disco moves with Bianca Jagger and Yoko Ono, and singing with Diana Ross. Tworney adds, “You can literally become best friends with cast members for the night; in this case, you become best friends with Freddie Mercury or Elton John, which is a really cool thing to do on a Hong Kong night out.”

Dreamstate, on the other hand, carries more local historical weight than only recreating a trip to a bygone world. The whole concept was based on retracing the roots of Hong Kong’s live entertainment scene that started more than 70 years ago in State Theatre; New World Development, which is behind its revamp, created the immersive show to document and pay tribute to this part of Hong Kong’s history ahead of the restored State Theatre’s reopening in 2026.

According to Lisa Tam, New World Development’s branding and communication general manager, stockbroker Harry Odell, who settled in Hong Kong after the First World War, saw the lack of world-class live performances in town and wanted to set up an entertainment hub of Hollywood standards. That was State Theatre, known as Empire Theatre before 1959. The venue was Odell’s starting point in Hong Kong to bring in overseas live performances and to show to other Asian countries “the proper way of putting together the entertainment industry”. Over the years, State Theatre was an iconic cultural venue that featured a 56-foot cinema screen and 1,400 seats, and hosted international film screenings, the local debut of Taiwanese pop diva Teresa Teng and a concert by Britain’s leading tenor Sir Peter Pears, until it was gradually taken over by City Hall after that building came into being in 1962, and by other cultural venues, and closed its doors in 1997. Before New World Development’s acquisition in October 2020, it was a snooker hall and sauna.

Dreamstate, in a renovated Shanghainese restaurant, was a reunion fiesta for people who spent their childhood working or living near State Theatre: grocery shop and teahouse owners and their successors, and people who work in the film, arts and culture sector. “The project came with an educational purpose, to tell the world how State Theatre wasn’t just a theatre but an integral part of Hong Kong’s performing arts identity, and the nightlife and livelihood of North Point, that made North Point into the ‘Little Shanghai’ that it was known to be,” Tam says. The next phase of the redevelopment project, she says, is to look for F&B, fashion and other commercial collaborators to bring back State Theatre— this time, as a modern cultural destination.

The pandemic also made immersive shows an alternative getaway for locals when tight travel restrictions made people spend their money on extravagant entertainment. Aside from regulars and expats, Crawford observes that their September shows had a wave of newcomers: teens, native Cantonese speakers, a woman and her female friends celebrating her 60th birthday. “Even though Hong Kong’s theatre space is quite niche, it’s such a different experience that appeals to more than just the theatre crowd,” Tworney explains.

From the venue’s perspective, immersive theatre brings in new business opportunities. In September 2022, The Murray collaborated with Aurora Theatre to stage the hotel’s first immersive show, An Unsolved Heist, a detective game where guests had to interrogate characters to solve an art theft over a five-course meal at its rooftop restaurant Popinjays. Wings Mok, The Murray’s director of communications, says that the hotel has benefited both in monetary terms and in building a refreshed image. “People see that the hotel is able to do a lot more than the usual [services],” she says. “Guests are always looking for something extraordinary. Theatrical performances take the dining experience to the next level, and this is what delights our guests.”

Not all immersive experiences come with lavish dining and settings. Tsuen Wan art and cultural space The Mills and food design team Deep Food decided they would use immersive dining experiences for an educational purpose. In November 2022, they invited local contemporary dance company TS Crew to stage The Myth of It/Eat— Plant Banquet at Rooot. Dancers used simple dishes made with unwanted parts and selections of vegetables as props, and used abstract, metaphorical movements to recreate the process of standardising our food before the produce ends up on the diners’ plates. Cindy Chan, founder of Deep Food, points out that food producers and processors, supermarkets and restaurants have created a culture of food waste, with fruits and vegetables not fitting particular standards of colours or shapes discarded.

Vicki Lui, the manager of The Mills’ cultural and community engagement team, says that there have been a lot of exhibitions, publications and products that teach the public to reconsider modern society’s food culture and reduce leftover food. “With an immersive show like this, guests can get to try the delicious dishes prepared with these ‘unwanted parts’, while dance is a more interesting way to convey the message when compared to texts in an exhibition,” she says.

The Mills’ production—and the others—only demonstrates how Hong Kong has taken up immersive theatre as more than merely entertainment: it comes with educational purposes, historical significance and cultural memories. And Hong Kong has the space for this genre. Crawford, who has been running Secret Theatre in Hong Kong for the past seven years, says, “Here, many people came to us after the shows and went, ‘We’ve been to all of them. This is great. Thanks so much, guys.’ That isn’t necessarily something you hear in London.”

And Crawford thinks immersive theatre doesn’t end at merely having a presence in Hong Kong: after doing high-end, immersive dinner shows, he wants to shake things up by putting Hong Kong in the genre’s spotlight in the future. Coming up, the Secret Theatre team has plans to stage a show inspired by Kowloon Walled City and work with old, hidden shops in the city.

Tworney says: “I’ve always had pulses on different cultural experiences happening globally that I thought would resonate with people in Hong Kong. It would be an extraordinary thing to transport people back in time to walk through the streets of Kowloon Walled City and bring to life [Hong Kong’s history]."

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