Can you solve the crazy, infuriating, mind-bogglingly surreal puzzle of the Dark Room?

Created by an Australian living in London John Roberston a few years ago it began life as a series of 300 linked YouTube videos, viewed 4million times to date, and is now a live interactive show which challenges audiences members to escape from his ’circular Kafkaesque hell’.

The 29-year-old has been chosen as the first act to perform at the newly reopened Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre and will be tormenting audiences in the old court room, dressed in black leather and a corset.

“It’s a live action video game. The crowd come in, the lights go down and then a floating head that sounds like Brian Blessed will appear. That’s me with a light strapped to my head, so it’s the most low budget show you could imagine, and then I climb into the crowd and shout ’You awake to find yourself in a dark room’ and then four options appear on the screen behind me and I grab people to choose one.“

Thinking it sounds a bit weird and not your thing? What if I told you that making it out of the Dark Room will bag you a prize of £500?

“It is possible to win,“ says John (comedians Brendan Burns and Stuart Goldsmith are the only two). “But even if you lose you get a prize from the Table of Wonders.

“A girl who heckled me a great deal got the Box of Possibly Meat and just as the lights went down people heard her screaming as she’d opened it to find 11lbs of sheep intestines.

“The butchers near my house love me.“ The Video Game Nation presenter, who has three games consoles plugged into his television at home in Kings Cross, came up with the idea after getting heckled by “hundreds of people“ at a show in Australia and solving it by getting the technicians to plunge the building into darkness.

“The crowd literally rioted and lost their minds as I was asking them how they would escape the dark room and contradicting them.

“By the time I got home, my inbox was almost full and kids were drawing fan art of me and set up a comic strip.

“So I sat down and lit my face with a lava lamp and made a series of videos for YouTube.“ The Perth native has now performed the show more than 300 times around the world, including for stand-up Mark Watson, computer game supremo Ian Livingstone OBE and in the lounge of Evening Standard journalist Bruce Dessau and once to a live online audience of 250,000, and the day.

“It’s a beautiful, fun show and the important thing people realise is it isn’t random, there is a map, “says John who has since created the “scarier“ White Room.

“Some people get so hooked to the insults and jokes and get hooked on the nonsense, but the show has it’s own very well devised logic.”

Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre, The Broadway, Hornsey, Friday, January 16, 8pm. Details: hthartscentre.co.uk