The walls are hung with black drapes and the floor is painted with blue whirls — perhaps to suggest the Baron’s view of the Earth as he chases an errant bee to the Moon. Mukul Ahmad dresses his five players in black, with each in turn putting on the scarlet frock coat to tell a tale, and no matter how bizarre the Baron’s adventures — whether building a palace on the topmost tip of a Cairngorm or riding a horse that has lost its hind legs — the air of unfazed self-assurance never abandons him.

The guiding principle of his rascally German-born creator, Rudolph Erich Raspe, seems to have been: “When in doubt, exaggerate.” Ahmad does the opposite whenever ravening beasts, whirling meteors or a bisected steed must enter the action, and searches out the essence or most economical way to represent these, frequently employing just four long staves, which can be weapons, clay pipes or the jaws of a crocodile. Both ingenious and comical, this minimalist approach is adopted with evident relish by the young cast (one actor, four actresses), whose straight-faced, straight-voiced role-playing offers only the occasional foray of tongue into cheek.

Since the adventures take us from Scotland to Amsterdam, Eastern Europe, Turkey and the East the local characters speak in a wide range of heavy accents, with Robert Mountford’s profound Scots brogue the first to hit us in the ear. His fellow performers are Caroline Kilpatrick, Catherine Kirk, Selina Zaza and Tanushka Marah, and if they and the other directors are as impressive in the harsher plays that follow, then Tara’s enterprise will have proved itself both entertaining and valuable.