What’s causing the tension between married couple Helen and Steve? Can Anna, the ‘professional relationship restorer’ help them? Does she want to? Overheard conversations, discarded photographs and CCTV footage all make up the clues in this fully immersive and interactive performance in which the audience turned detectives have more than one case to solve: what lies at the bottom of the mystery, and who’s part of the performance and who’s an actual guest?

The Other Way Works is a Birmingham based company creating playful and immersive theatre through intimate scenarios that allow audiences to explore places anew. Founded in 2001, and led by Katie Day, they are a part of a new wave of theatre makers re-inventing the way people engage with culture, using real world spaces and emerging technologies.

Katie Day, Artistic Director of The Other Way Works said, “Experiencing Black Tonic has been described as ‘like being in a film’, it’s a visceral treat for all your senses. Performing in a real, operating hotel provides the ultimate true-to-life theatre set, and gives our audiences an exciting sense of being in on a secret. There’s no craning to see the action over the heads of 20 people in front of you, as our audience experience Black Tonic in a pair.

Far from being the unacknowledged ghosts required by so many immersive events, our audiences play an active role and are treated as valued hotel guests for the duration of their stay. For example, in one scene a mysterious character invites our audience to join him for a game of cards, and through the playing of the game our audience magically generate an interactive soundscape, powered by bespoke technology created in collaboration with Watershed in Bristol, for the 2015 tour.”