Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, You: The Drop Off

Needle, meet haystack. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find one man identified only by a fuzzy faxed photograph in a city of nine million. He has a beard and a bad haircut. As if that narrowed it down.

Your journey will take you up hill and down escalators, threading through crowded tubes, criss-crossing the river, into dank and unloved corners of Waterloo or Borough Market and for a drink in a posh bar with a smooth villain straight out of Central Casting. How observant are you? Is his suit too shiny and his watch too cheap? Did he really go to Harrow? Did you?

As participants in the Immersive Ensemble’s city caper The Drop Off, you can invent your own spy persona, turn up with a gang of fellow detectives, or perhaps best of all be randomly assigned to a team of four and meet your co-conspirators at a zone 1 venue texted to you the night before.

Once ID’d, you’re given an Oyster card and a cellphone to keep in touch with your spymaster, an envelope with some basic instructions. Then, it's over to you to find the witnesses and flesh out the drama for yourself. Keep on the trail and you may end up escaping the baddies on a speedboat down the Thames.

Even if you can’t follow the plot of Murder She Wrote, you can have a good time if you just go with the flow. The logistics are excellent: creatives behind the show have worked with Secret Cinema and Gingerline, and the actors play it all dead straight. Be prepared to move; our concealed Fitbit says we walked, or ran, 5km.

We also loved being spirited away to a safe house to meet other spooks and discover the outcome of our undercover work. With cocktails at £4.50 you can be shaken, stirred, and ultimately shitfaced on martinis.

The Drop Off continues until 3 December.  Tickets £65-70 (singles must pay £70 — boo!) from the Design My Night website. Dates vary, check before booking.

We attended this event on a complimentary ticket.