Written and directed by Angie Farrow

The strange, the real, the impossible, and the disorientingly funny...Written and directed by Angie Farrow

The strange, the real, the impossible, and the disorientingly funny...Having premiered this production of The Bowler Hat as part of the 2006 Festival of New Arts, Angie and her team are bringing it to the Fringe in Wellington in February.

The Bowler Hat sweeps from dream to dream through the genres of detective thriller, whodunnit, and avant-garde theatre. It is a fairground ride into the odd and vibrant world of one's own reality and unreality. It exists at the funeral of the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte (1898-1967), and includes a detective investigating the death of Magritte's mother, a director of a play who is under the impression that the people at the funeral are her actors and dancers, and the loss of the dead painter's clothes.

In award-winning playwright Angie Farrow's hands this is a piece of absorbing physical theatre and a complex weave of multiple media, genres, live music and dreams. It is also a basic and rich comedy.

Angie Farrow's work was last seen in Wellington with the much acclaimed After Kafka, and the Theatre Pataphysical production of Despatch in the Fringe Festival last year.

Angie explores the poetry of physical theatre, to create words and theatre around moving pictures. The enveloping and compelling music (composed for The Bowler Hat by Musical Director, composer, singer/songwriter, Susan Hawes) creates a bath of sound in which the whole play can be immersed. Like a dream sequence, the music changes abruptly and radically before returning again to the connecting waves of sound with which we began our journey.

"We are controlled by 'presence of mind', which reveals reality as an absolute mystery. We exist within mystery, whether we know it or not." - Rene Magritte

The Bowler Hat is a magical ride with dance, visual projection, physical theatre and original music.

"Laced with verbal, posed and projected images from the painter's work, the production is remarkable .... It fittingly reflects a man who said 'the world is a defiance of common sense' then painted it." Evening Standard
"The Bowler Hat is a work of international standard." Massey University

In the Fringe Festival at BATS Theatre
When: 7 - 11 February, 6.00pm
Tickets: $15 / $12
Booking: 04 802 4175 or