Festive theatrical feasts serve audiences a slap-up dinner with their entertainment. But is what’s on stage as appetising as what’s on your plate?

In west London, a line of smartly dressed theatregoers on a street corner enter a building and walk back in time. We pass through tight lamp-lit corridors and arrive in a cavernous hall, with tables laid and lanterns dangling overhead. This is Charles Dickens’ parlour, where he has just finished writing A Christmas Carol, and it’s dinner time.

The Great Christmas Feast is an immersive production in which a three-course meal is served while a quicksilver Dickens (David Alwyn) narrates his ghost story about the perils of penny-pinching in the season of goodwill. Immersive theatre has evidently concocted a tasty festive offshoot that might suit those tired of watching yet another straight-up adaptation of the classic tale.

Punchdrunk Enrichment Stores, London
This gentle and generous piece of immersive theatre combines captivating storytelling with moments of wonder

We’re on our way to see Fireside Tales and my five-year-old son, Benji, is full of questions. Will the fire be real? Where will we sit? Luckily, it doesn’t take long for Benji’s anxiety to settle. Punchdrunk Enrichment’s new show has, like its predecessors, been created with schools, communities and children in mind. It’s a gentle and generous piece of immersive theatre – one that often, quite literally, takes the children by their hands and invites them to become part of the story.

To start off, we’re invited to browse the “bookstore”, crammed full of intriguing trinkets to touch and play with. Anxiety quelled and curiosity piqued, it’s time to enter the Punchdrunk Enrichment store where the show proper begins. And what a store it is, designed with immaculate attention to detail by Mydd Pharo. The shelves spill over with quirky objects; clusters of feathers, boxes of globes, bundles of photos, twinkling lava lamps and dusty typewriters.