Inventive Productions founder and company director Sam Shearman has spent years refining the intersection of hospitality and live performance, establishing high-profile London venues such as Alcotraz, Moonshine Saloon, and Avora. The team’s latest long-running endeavour, Hexmoor: Wizarding Prison, takes that concept further into active roleplaying territory. Situated on Hackney Road, the 105-minute experience locks participants into prison jumpsuits as convicted dark magic felons, requiring visitors to explore contraband mechanics, navigate institutional intrigue, and engage with live performers who must adapt to unpredictable public choices in real time.
For players of tabletop roleplaying games, Hexmoor poses classic game-mastering dilemmas: how do you balance player agency against hard time limits, draw genuine roleplay out of newcomers without heavy-handed railroading, and run an identical module hundreds of times without the setting going stale? In this wide-ranging discussion, Shearman reflects on the operational craft behind Hexmoor, addressing the cultural weight of wizarding tropes, the mechanical integration of drink delivery, the discipline required to maintain an actor-proof world bible, and the company’s upcoming winter spin-off, The Longest Night.
What is coming next for Inventive Productions beyond Hexmoor, and are you planning to expand your current venue model into entirely non-alcoholic, narrative-first tabletop experiences?
The tabletop world is new to me and one I have become fascinated with as we have got closer to this with Hexmoor. It is not in our immediate roadmap, but I would never say never. We are learning more about what this audience likes and dislikes, and in the future, might be able to bring something really exciting to them. Our current experiences very much fuse together immersive theatre with a high-quality cocktail experience. We have a lot of respect for the tabletop world and if we were to do anything we would want to ensure that we do it right.
What is genuinely next is creating brand-new seasonal spin-offs of each of our four shows, Hexmoor included, titled “The Longest Night”. Its premise is that on December 21st, the sun sets on the longest night of the year in both our real world and the forbidden fantasy world of Hexmoor. On this longest night, the light sealing the Hollow King in the void is at its weakest, so the inmates have decorated the prison with whatever they could steal and kept every lantern burning. Then frost starts forming on the inside of the walls. Nobody underground can see the sky, so they keep the vigil every performance. Special festive ticket types are available, which include a take-home candle to keep the flame burning at home.
On the non-alcoholic point, there is an interesting conversation here. We have noticed the obvious trends towards more non-alcoholic options. All of our experiences now have equally as strong non-alcoholic offerings as we do have cocktail offerings. There has been a trend with our newer experiences, Avora and Hexmoor, to weigh more heavily towards the immersive theatre side than the cocktail side, and we have seen audiences resonate with this.
Hexmoor opened its gates on Hackney Road to strong reviews; now that the production has a full year of live operation behind it, what specific design or theatrical element proved hardest to balance once real audiences stepped inside?
Tone. Hexmoor is a comedy for most of its length and then it is not, and the handover between those two things is the hardest thing in the show. Go too dark too early and the room tenses up and stops playing. Leave it too late and the ending arrives without having been earned.
What we found in the first months is that the handover cannot be a moment, it has to be a slope. The cast now plays it as a gradual withdrawal of the joke rather than a switch, and guests describe the last half hour as having crept up on them, which is exactly right.
The second one was pace of discovery. Some cells get the contraband wand in ten minutes and some in an hour, and the show has to work for both. We had to break down each cell’s experience to ensure that our actors were comfortable with giving different information to each cell, depending on where on the journey they were.
In tabletop roleplaying games, the Game Master adapts immediately when a party derails the session. When non-gamers arrive at Hexmoor without expecting to roleplay, how do your actors draw out genuine participation without resorting to aggressive railroading?
This is the real craft problem in immersive work and almost nobody writes about it.
Most of our guests are not theatre people. A lot of them booked because it sounded like a good night and have not thought past that. If you put them on the spot in the first five minutes, you lose them for the whole show.
So we do it in reverse. The first thing that happens is not a request, it is a costume. You are processed and issued a jumpsuit, so you are visibly inside the fiction before anyone has asked you to speak. That is a far lower bar than a question.
Then the cast works people individually rather than addressing the room. A question asked to one person in a cell is answerable. The same question asked to sixty people is terrifying.
This really is a skill set, though, for performers in trying to make quick judgement calls on who is interested in participation versus who is more interested in observation.
Tabletop campaigns rely heavily on mechanical stakes, whereas immersive theatre relies on sensory environment and social pressure. Where does live immersive theatre genuinely borrow design principles from roleplaying games, and where must it abandon them completely?
The overlap is shared fiction with participants inside it. Everyone in the room is holding up the same imagined world and the quality of the night depends on how willing they are to keep holding it. That is the same instinct in both.
Where it stops is the clock and the ending. We have 1 hour 45 and a written finish. Our actors cannot follow an interesting tangent for forty minutes. A good GM can, and should, and that freedom is not available to us at all.
The bigger one is consequence. If your players burn down the tavern, it stays burned for the rest of the campaign. Ours resets before the next show. We can put someone inside a world for a night. We cannot give them a world that remembers them.
What we can do is put it in front of someone who has never played anything and have them participating within twenty minutes.
We are actually exploring what else we can borrow from roleplaying games by trying to develop more story exploration outside of the physical experience that guests attend (whether that be discovering information before they attend or continuing the story after, online and in the digital world). This is on the horizon for Hexmoor.
A typical tabletop group might run an adventure module once, but Hexmoor runs its core storyline multiple times a day, six days a week. How do you prevent your cast and your narrative from going stale across hundreds of repeated runs?
You separate what is fixed from what is free, and you are strict about it.
The plot is fixed. The beats land in the same order every night, because the story has to work and because a cast improvising structure will eventually improvise into a hole with a full house watching. Everything between the beats is free. The character knows who they are and what they want. How they travel between beats is theirs.
That is also what keeps actors alive in it. Nobody can perform a script 5 times a day for a year. They can perform a person that often, because the people in front of them are different every time.
And the guests genuinely change the night. Not the ending. But who gets pulled into what, which cell an actor spends longest in, which guest turns out to be the one who will do anything. That varies every show and the cast plays it live rather than around it.
Any UK experience featuring a “wizarding prison” immediately risks being compared to Azkaban or the broader Harry Potter franchise. How conscious was the team of the shifting cultural and commercial appetite around that specific IP, and how did you deliberately construct Hexmoor’s lore to stand on its own two feet?
There is one very dominant reference point for magic in the UK, and the trap is that if you borrow even a small amount of its furniture you inherit all of it. We did borrow some of it early on. Parts of our site still use language from that first pass and we are rewriting them, which I would rather say plainly than pretend we arrived fully formed.
What changed is that we stopped building outwards from the magic and started building downwards from the institution. Hexmoor is a prison first. It has paperwork, a hierarchy, a contraband economy, a High Constable who is corrupt in a specific way, and a history on the ground it stands on. The magic is what people are locked up for, not what the world is made of. That gave us our own vocabulary, the Bureau of Arcane Order, the Hollow King, the Moorgrounds, the suppressant potions, and a show that does not collapse the moment someone reaches for a comparison.
On the cultural question, I am not going to talk about another author. I would rather tell you what we are. Hexmoor’s cast is hugely proud to be predominately from the LGBTQ+ community and that is deliberate. Now we are finding our feet with the experience, we are having conversations with LGBTQ+ charities about working together. If we can contribute in some small shape to shift the cultural conversation into a more positive light for these communities who have been impacted by those magical franchises, then I would deem Hexmoor a success.
Because Hexmoor operates alongside Alcotraz in the same Shoreditch footprint, early critics noted the physical overlap between standard cell blocks and fantasy wings. How did you solve the creative and architectural challenge of transforming a gritty, real-world prison setting into a distinct magical penitentiary?
It is one site but it is not one world, and the join is the part I am proudest of.
You arrive in our world. The front of the building is Alcotraz, which is deliberately real, a prohibition prison that could have existed. Then you are taken through into a part of the venue most people walking past have no idea is there, and that threshold is where Hexmoor starts. Crossing it is the single most important moment in the show, because the fantasy only works if the thing before it felt ordinary.
That is the opposite of the usual approach, which is to signal the fantasy from the pavement. We hide it. By the time you are issued a jumpsuit you have already physically left somewhere, and the brain does something with that which no amount of set dressing achieves on its own.
Architecturally it meant the two shows had to be designed against each other rather than next to each other. Different materials, different light, different sound. Alcotraz is concrete and bad lighting. Hexmoor is older and stranger. If they had resembled each other the threshold would do nothing.
Immersive experiences in London face substantial overheads, from prime commercial leases to live actor payrolls. What does framing a venue around fantasy and dark magic afford you commercially that your previous shows, such as Moonshine Saloon or Alcotraz, did not?
The obvious one is audience. Fantasy is not era-specific and not drink-led, so the show reaches people who would never book a cocktail experience.
The less obvious one is stakes. A themed bar can give you atmosphere and a good night. It cannot give you a thing that is coming at the end of the evening that everyone in the room knows about. Fantasy lets the last half hour go somewhere a prohibition bar structurally cannot, and that is a writing advantage rather than a marketing one.
What it costs you is that fantasy audiences are informed. They notice an inconsistency you would get away with anywhere else, and they are right to. The world has to hold up under attention rather than just look good under low light. That is more expensive in writing time than in money.
Your cast relies on freelance actors rotating through key roles like Warden Cordelia Constance-Xanthe and inmate sorcerers. How do you document your world bible so that lore, character boundaries, and guest safety remain consistent across cast changes?
You write it down, and you are disciplined about how much.
Canon in one person’s head does not survive a rotating cast. Nor does canon that runs to two hundred pages, because nobody reads it. So we keep a tight world document and a page per character covering what they want, what they know, what they are lying about, and what they must never say. That last category matters most. Most consistency failures are not someone getting a fact wrong, they are someone inventing a fact to fill a gap. This is actually an area we are hugely building on at the moment, but we have been very fortunate that our actors naturally play within our worlds without dictated guidance.
Our High Constable, Cordelia Constance-Xanthe IV, is the warden figure in everything but name, and the name matters because she belongs to the Bureau rather than to a prison service. That kind of distinction is exactly what the document exists to hold.
With regards to safety, we are actually incredibly proud of our safeguarding policies. We recognise that our audiences aren’t always from an immersive theatre background, so we’ve taken it very seriously to try to articulate what the rules of play are. We have strict policies against any touching of actors, any hate or discriminatory speech and more. We make these very clear to customers when booking and on their tickets, as well as the first thing they hear on the night. It’s always important to deliver these out of the world before you bring them into the world, and we found successes in doing so.
The drinks in Hexmoor are built into the plot as “potions” engineered to dampen an inmate’s magical abilities. How did the writing team integrate drink delivery into the scene’s action economy so hospitality never stalls the dramatic momentum?
By making the drink a plot device rather than a service break.
The failure mode in immersive hospitality is a show that stops dead while someone hands out glasses. We avoided it by giving the drinks a reason to exist in the fiction. They are suppressant potions, dosed to hold an inmate’s magic down, and you are made to take them. That turns every round into a scene with a power dynamic in it rather than a pause for refreshment.
It also means the pacing is written rather than scheduled. Each dose lands at a point where the story needed someone to come to your cell anyway, and the fact that the suppressant works less well as the night goes on is doing narrative work at the same time as the bar is doing its job.
The test we use is simple. If you could remove the drink and the scene would still work, the drink is not in the show, it is just being served during it.
Beyond Hexmoor’s iron gates, which independent UK immersive show, live gaming venue, or tabletop creator has impressed you recently, and where should our readers go to follow your work?
I am always impressed with Phantom Peak who do an incredible job of writing new and exciting aspects into their shows. They know their audience perfectly, and they cater to them perfectly. I know Nick, their co-creator, and I know how good a job he does at bringing audiences back to the experience, which is always a great signal in business that you are doing something right.
Shearman’s operational perspective highlights the practical discipline required to maintain an interactive fantasy setting under the commercial demands of London’s entertainment market. By treating narrative boundaries, actor safeguarding, and hospitality logistics as interdependent parts of the same production engine rather than conflicting priorities, Hexmoor offers an instructive case study for anyone designing interactive stories at scale. Readers interested in visiting the Hackney Road cell block or tracking the company’s seasonal productions can explore show schedules and booking details directly at Hexmoor or via partners like Virgin Experience Days.
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