SYNOPSIS

Filled with hope, Noah arrives in London and seeks out Hector, the owner of a hat factory. Having just turned fourteen, he proudly declares that he is now old enough to work twelve hours a day and is willing to do any job. While performing various menial tasks around the factory, Noah proposes a ten-minute break at four o'clock every afternoon for the workers. Productivity does not decline after the break is introduced, but Hector had expected a five percent increase in output. Claiming that Noah failed to deliver on his promise, Hector attempts to dismiss him. Noah argues that the workers have come to respect Hector for granting them the break, and that taking it away now would only leave them feeling betrayed. Convinced by this reasoning, Hector allows Noah to remain at the factory.

Noah is eventually given permission to learn felting, the most important stage of hat production, but the veteran worker assigned to teach him remains distant and unfriendly. During one of the afternoon breaks, Noah discovers Jocelyn, a mysterious young man hiding in a corner of the factory. Fascinated by Jocelyn's tea, cookies, and unusual imagination, Noah begins spending time with him every day. Jocelyn passes the time sketching strange hats, and the two gradually become close friends.
When the felting worker suddenly leaves the factory, Noah takes over the job himself. Before long, he begins to suffer from unexplained physical symptoms. After investigating the process, he realizes that the mercury used in felting is poisoning the workers. Noah urges Jocelyn to help him confront Hector, but Jocelyn refuses to appear.

After hearing Noah's concerns, Hector gathers the entire workforce. He admits that mercury is dangerous but insists that the process cannot be changed. Anyone who wishes to leave is free to do so. Faced with the reality of earning a living, the workers remain, and Noah alone is dismissed for speaking out.

With nowhere else to go, Noah settles in a district inhabited by the homeless and the poor. Together with Jocelyn, whom he regards as a designer, he begins making hats using the skills he learned at the factory. Hector's business mass-produces standardized top hats for wealthy customers. Noah, in contrast, creates hats that reflect the memories, identities, and stories of the people who wear them.

As Noah's hats gain popularity, Hector denounces them as a threat to social order and sends the police to shut down the workshop. When Noah desperately searches for Jocelyn, Hector tells him that there are only two people present: Hector and Noah himself. He reveals that the sketches Noah believed Jocelyn had drawn were actually Noah's own work. Jocelyn, it turns out, is Noah's split identity—an imagined son of Hector created within Noah's mind.

Although Noah comes to understand that he is suffering from mercury-induced delusions, Jocelyn continues to appear before him. With his workshop gone, Noah searches for another way to communicate his belief that hats should represent more than social status and class. He organizes a march to the Great Exhibition, inviting people to wear the hats he created and walk together.

Many join the procession, but the police disperse the crowd in the name of maintaining public order. In the end, only Noah reaches the entrance of the Exhibition.

Inside, Noah enters Hector's hat display. He appears to praise the hats as masterpieces crafted from the finest materials and the labor of skilled workers, but gradually reveals that they are also built upon the suffering and sacrifice of those same workers. By this point, however, his speech has become increasingly fragmented and dreamlike, and the audience dismisses him as a madman.

At the end, Jocelyn appears one final time and tells Noah that it is time to go home. Wearing the yellow hat he created himself, Noah leaves the stage together with him.

After Noah disappears, Jocelyn remains behind. He says that there is nothing more left to show, asks once again what a raven and a writing desk have in common, and declares:

"This is the story of a hatter.“

With those final words, Jocelyn vanishes.


Review

Jocelyn wanders freely across the stage even before the performance begins. Existing at the boundary between reality and fantasy, he is initially presented ambiguously: is he a real person or merely a creation of Noah's imagination? He serves as both the narrator of the story and Noah's guide into another world, functioning as a combination of the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The tea and cookies prepared by Jocelyn evoke the Mad Tea Party. Every day at 4 PM, the ten-minute break Noah creates for the factory workers becomes not only a catalyst for improving their working conditions, but also a moment when Noah's imagination takes flight. During this brief respite, Jocelyn tells stories of strange hats and Wonderland, gently leading Noah beyond the boundaries of reality.

The strange hat at the center of the story is, quite literally, the identity of the Mad Hatter. Yet the musical gives it a more grounded meaning than the dreamlike symbolism of the original novel. Noah's hats preserve memories and individuality, whereas Hector's top hats symbolize power and wealth. The conflict between standardized mass production and personal creativity is reminiscent of the recent film Wonka, in which Willy Wonka stands against the established chocolate industry. Hector's top hat is priced at ten shillings and six pence—equivalent to Noah's biweekly salary.

The raven and the writing desk, perhaps the most famous riddle from the original novel, serve here as a device connecting the beginning and the end of the story. Jocelyn's lines and monologues are filled with references to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the musical uses nonsense logic and wordplay to weave this prequel naturally into the world of the original work.

The Great Exhibition is not part of Lewis Carroll's novel, but in this musical it becomes the climactic space where reality and fantasy intersect. Noah's final speech, in which he appears to praise Hector's hats while simultaneously condemning them, seems to explain the origins of the Mad Hatter's dreamlike and fragmented language.

As Noah becomes involved in the felting process, he is poisoned by mercury in the real world. At the same time, his mind gradually shifts toward the logic of Wonderland. In this sense, Jocelyn is less a character than Wonderland itself. One minor criticism is that Noah's discovery of mercury poisoning feels more like a dramatic device than a historically plausible development. The toxicity of mercuric nitrate was not scientifically established at the time, making this more of a dramatic device than a historical reality.

There are far more Alice references than I expected. Ravens and writing desks, tea parties, strange hats, nonsense language, and the blurred boundary between reality and fantasy are scattered throughout the production. Yet the center of the plot is not Alice but an Industrial Revolution-era social drama. This musical is essentially a Victorian social drama featuring the Mad Hatter, with symbols from Alice in Wonderland carefully sprinkled throughout its world.

The set design relies on a minimal number of steel structures to represent the factory gate, machinery, Hector's office, and various other locations. Two thin steel frames stand at the back of the stage, while a pair of larger three-dimensional structures occupies the front. These four units slide continuously along rails to transform the stage. For a two-hander, the production is remarkably ambitious, perhaps even a little too busy at times. The idea is clever, but the frequent movement occasionally draws more attention to the stage mechanics than to the story itself.

The back wall is lined with neatly arranged top hats. When illuminated, they become more than mere props, appearing instead as symbols of social hierarchy and the established order of the era. Lighting is used effectively throughout the production, with colors conveying emotions, tension, and changing circumstances. In particular, the shifting hues during Noah's moments of inner conflict vividly illustrate his psychological fragmentation.

The music is serviceable. Few songs linger in the memory, but the score supports the narrative without disrupting its flow.

The actor playing Noah delivers an impressive physical performance. His movements convincingly portray Noah's journey from an ordinary factory worker into a figure caught between reality and fantasy.

The actor portraying Hector, Jocelyn, and several other roles leaves a stronger impression musically. His clear and beautiful tone complements the character's ethereal quality, and his singing helps create the dreamlike atmosphere that defines Jocelyn's scenes.

The story itself is a fairly natural origin tale. The connections rarely feel forced, and the musical does a respectable job of weaving together the world of Alice, the hat-making industry of the Industrial Revolution, and the historical expression "mad as a hatter." At times, however, it feels a little too eager to explain the Mad Hatter through logic and causality. For audiences who prefer the mystery and absurdity of the original novel, the story may come across as somewhat over-explanatory. Nevertheless, this remains a convincing prequel: a Victorian social drama centered on the Mad Hatter, with the symbols of Wonderland thoughtfully scattered throughout.