Guruguru is a highly watchable and extremely likeable idiot-clown providing a truly unusual experience. He is both hugely idiotic and just simply huge. The show begins with him calling from behind the curtain for a lost friend called Happiness, and when he emerges in his Uncle Fester/jester outfit there is a collective intake of breath in mild amazement at the dimensions of the man. Like a Frankenstein’s fool with gigantic hands, he makes frequent forays into the audience, dispensing an infectious benevolence and at times encircling several people at once within the bounds of his friendly hugs.

He has a strong accent (possibly Italian), and it was sometimes a struggle to hear every word past the music bleeding in from the bar next door, but the accent and the strange poetry of his musings adds to the absurd effect. He delivers absurdist, existential aphorisms like a happy imbecile accidentally spouting pearls of wisdom, and there is a sense that beneath the idiocy there is a very warm heart and keen philosophical mind. And yet there is no hint of a separation between person and the persona, so thoroughly does he appear to have found his clown.

Brighton Fringe 2015As with the best of Fools, you’re never quite sure if you are laughing at him or with him, but laughing we all are at his heart-warming stupidity. It does become quite, quite mad, and whilst he was pulling the limbs off a doll, and making strange incantations above a copper cauldron, I briefly imagined he was about to kill and cook us all. But by the end of the show we are all sporting broad grins and it does indeed seem we have received some effective, if highly eccentric, instruction on the way to find Happiness.