“Always keep your bowler on in times of stress. And watch out for diabolical masterminds.”

-- “Talented amateur” British TV super-spy Mrs. Emma Peel, to her debonair and refined partner in espionage, John Steed, 1967.

Sound advice. Before John Steed, of course, Charle Chaplin’s most famous character, The Tramp, wore a bowler, and Rene Magritte appropriated the bowler-as-surrealist-emblem around the same time Steed was partnered up with the future Pussy Galore.

You can add to that august roster of bowlerites Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle, the ingenious physical and conceptual comedians who perform together as rainpan 43. The Studio Theatre is presenting three of their whimsical slapstick shows this month, including the work-in-progress Amnesia Curiosa and the new machines machines machines machines machines machines machines. But first in the lineup is their road-tested and mercilessly gut-busting all wear bowlers, a delightful 80-minute flight of self-referential fancy wherein these two impish hobos find themselves, to their horror, trapped onstage with your voyeuristic ass staring at them, ravenous with expectation. Their increasingly desperate attempts to evade your cruel gaze comprise pretty much the rest of the show.

We meet this pair via an old-timey black-and-white silent film, wandering the dusty plain. It’s not giving away too much to say they quickly find themselves spat out from the celluloid confines of the movie and into the real world. This happens every so often in movies, from Woody Allen’s pretty good The Purple Rose of Cairo to John McTiernan’s famously bad Last Action Hero. So it’s pretty much Charlie Chapin meets Bill Irwin meets Woody Allen meets Laurel and Hardy meets Rene Magritte meets Arnold Schwarzenegger. Could that possibly be bad? Well, never mind that; it isn’t. In fact, it’s great!

Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle photo by Greg Costanzo; courtesy Studio Theatre

In a way, All Wear Bowlers is a perfect show for audiences more accustomed to the relative anonymity of the movies, because one of the most fertile sources of humor here is that Lyford and Sobelle can see you, too. (Lyford's soft, Ralph Wiggum-like cry of panic upon making this discovery is a perfect example of how he extorts big laffs with the most minute of gestures.) Both men slowly acquire limited powers of speech over the course of the show, but the focus remains overwhelmingly on their extraordinary grace and dexterity, sleight of hand, foot, and any other appendage you’d care to name, and sheer, unfailing stamina.

In the early going, when the border between the stage and silver screen remains porous, they leap back and forth from monochrome and two dimensions to color and three, their movements never seeming choreographed despite being perfectly synchronized with those of their filmic alter egos. Once they start to get over their fear of the audience, there comes some confusion over which patch of felt-covered real-estate belongs to which butt – a joke any patron who’s ever been made the victim of a seemingly arbitrary seat-change will appreciate. The physical gags keeping growing in sophistication until they're equal parts gymnastics and sleight-of-hand illusion, but Lyford and Sobelle make it all look effortless. As impressive as all this is, everything is mere preamble to the moment when Lyford morphs himself into a particularly profane and unstable ventriloquist’s dummy. And then King Kong. Or Godzilla.

While Lyford and Sobelle are obviously the stars here, the show is also technically superb, with Randy Glickman’s otherwordly lighting design and James Sugg’s eerie sound score helping to make all this clowning around feel somehow profound and transformative. It’s a stressful ordeal for Lyford and Sobelle, but they keep their bowlers on right through to the end, when the audience fairly leaps from their chairs to acknowledge the pair's inventiveness, their skill, and above all, their goofy generosity. Expulsion from movie-world may be a cruel fate, but with performers like these two in it, you couldn't call the real world dreary.

The rainpan 43 Festival is at Studio Theatre through April 20. all wear bowlers (about 80 minutes, no intermission) will be performed through Sunday, April 6. Tickets are available here; run, don’t walk.