A confession: D&D means nothing to me. I’m here for the ‘theatre’ component of this interactive staging of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

On this occasion, however, I have some back-up in the form of my teenaged son, an emerging Dungeon Master and very much across everything I am not.

“This is actually pretty good,” he told me at the halfway point of this boisterous, big-on-visuals, semi-improvised performance. “It’s like WWE for nerds.”

The Twenty_Sided Tavern. Photo © Daniel Boud

The Twenty-Sided Tavern turns the Opera House Studio into a gaming arena focused on a corner stage backed by a big screen. Three performers enact the adventure, whose twists and turns are decided by rolls of the dice and rules enforced by a “rules lawyer” (Zoe Harlen).

Our MC and Dungeon Master is William Kasper; the three adventurers on this occasion are the energetic trio of Atlas Adams (playing an itinerant monk, John-Paul, who is, in fact, two people – one John, the other Paul), Eleanor Stankiewicz (an undead skeleton cowboy-wizard, Dustin), and Trubie-Dylan Smith (randy troubadour, Tamberlaine).

Each has particular powers and skill sets to draw upon, though most of what...