Best Festival Ever, a show combining theatre, board games and science, puts the audience at its centre and tasks them with staging their own music festival involving everything from choosing the bands to building the festival site.

But as one of its co-creators, along with fellow members of Canberra science-theatre ensemble Boho Interactive, Finnigan assures would-be participants they have nothing to fear with the "gentle" interactivity.

"We make it an interactive performance, but as a group we're all terrified of all those kinds of things … we're not naturally confident performers," he said.

"The audience do participate but they're not performers in this, no one gets pulled up on stage having to act out a role."

Best Festival Ever will have its Australian premiere at The Street Theatre on Wednesday, August 12.

Since its first performance at the London Science Museum in 2014, the show has been staged in 14 venues around the world in everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms.

The show was developed in 2011 as a way to make systems science fun and easy to understand.

"We were all a bit tired of doing shows in traditional theatre spaces with theatre audiences, we wanted to do something we could take into offices, classrooms, boardrooms everywhere," Finnigan said.

"So we made a show that could happen around a table … then we began thinking about board games.

"There's this really fun story about a music festival and the disaster that unfolds there, and folded within that is a conversation about system science."

For each 80-minute show, up to 30 people are seated around a table to create the music festival with the help of a tabletop board game.

At the end there's a "science chat" over a glass of wine about how systems science can be applied to everyday life with a line-up of Canberra science figures including Will Steffen from the Climate Council, Bob Costanza from the ANU, Brian Walker from CSIRO, Nicky Grigg from CSIRO, John Finnigan from CSIRO and Eleanor Malbon from RegNet.

"The core idea of systems science is that everything is connected, as people we're connected in society, economically with our money and socially," Finnigan said.

"Everything you change may have an unexpected impact somewhere else.

"The scientists we've got on board are people who think about the big issues … about what's going to happen to us as a society in the next 30 years or as a species in the next 100 years.

"They're looking at way things are drastically changing on a global scale."

But Finnigan said the show sounds "a lot more intellectual than it is" and with audiences can expect some laughs while they work out how to appease a tantrum from Coldplay's Chris Martin or fight over song choices.

"It's probably the most chilled out thing we've done," he said.

Best Festival Ever: How to manage a disaster is on at The Street Theatre from August 12 to 22.

Tickets are $20, which also covers a festival wine, beer or soft drink at the end.