SEAN HUGHES, PENGUINS, Weymouth Pavilion

TO go and see Sean Hughes is like being caught in a vortex of joy – you aren’t sure what’s going to happen next, but you are delighted to go along for the ride.

Ultimately only one thing is certain, by the end of the night your face will hurt from laughing.

Covering everything from his early childhood, adolescence, relationships, family, pets, technology, Katy Perry, heartbreak, love, learning to get up and try again, vets, Italy, the ageing process, Weymouth’s Last Supper sand sculpture, the media, Irish folk songs, religion, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, microwaves, school, The Hobbit, bad football banter, parsnips, dyslexia, buying local, being told made-up stuff by your parents and why the younger generation can’t be fooled as they have Google, travel and a love of the Human League, his two-hour Penguins show flew by in a blur of jollity.

From quick fire jokes and off-the-top-of-the-head tangents to complex stories and call-backs to punch lines, Sean kept the energy and the laughter flowing.

The audience was promised the ‘best show he had ever done,’ as we battled it out with the Beer Festival next door for decibel level and it was a fantastic evening.

If you weren’t there you truly missed something special. A lot of the audience had seen Sean’s shows before they told me, and everyone at the bar in the interval was turning to each other and exchanging exclamations along the lines of: ‘Wow!’ Starting the show in the dark, a small penguin appeared above a curtain singing along to Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.

He (or maybe it was a lady penguin), was then replaced in the sing-a-long by a bust of Jesus, before the man himself, Sean Hughes, burst forth onto the stage for a couple of bars of the iconic song.

However, that’s not to say he doesn’t have regrets, joking that everyone did.

There were props to illustrate his stories and a costume change, where he got members of the audience to come on stage and dance to distract from his quick-change – ‘a la a Katy Perry concert.’ The beauty of the evening was his skill to get to the root of the things we have all experienced – joy, sadness, love, awkward dinner parties – and the sense we are all somehow in it together, although we have our own paths.

Just like the universal ‘kettle in the garden’ moment, when you realise you are standing in the garden with a kettle and you have absolutely no idea what you are doing there.

The show ended on a very sweet note with observations about first love, heartbreak, new love and how life can change from sadness to hope in a second and how life is ultimately about finding happiness on your own path.

The show was, from start to finish, an uplifting delight.

CATHERINE BOLADO