No laughing matter: the clown who wants to fix all our problems

Julia Masli tries to cure her audience's woes in her stage show. Now an archive of recordings has been turned into a BBC documentary.

- Rachael Healy reports

For the past three years, Julia Masli has collected problems. And night after night, in theatres around the world, she has tried to solve more than 1,500 of them.

Masli isn't a therapist, priest or life coach - she's a clown. Her show hahahahahaha is an otherworldly experience: she roams the room, swathed in blue fabric, holding a golden mannequin leg that doubles as a microphone and asking audience members: "Problem?"

But instead of fearing the audience interaction, Masli has created a space where people are braced to expect the question and so are willing to answer it (somewhat) honestly.

Her director, the performance artist Kim Noble, suggested that she should record the problems, ending each show with a soundscape of that night's human concerns. Those recordings have now been transformed into a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Illuminated: Problems with Julia Masli.