The Sex Lives of Puppets

Following a sell-out run and rave reviews at Southwark Playhouse, London, in January 2024, accolades at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024, and a second London run in the autumn of 2024, puppet masters Blind Summit Theatre are taking The Sex Lives of Puppets, the show that pulls back the covers on puppet sex in contemporary Britain, on the road.

Funny, shocking and often surprisingly tender, this collaboration between puppets and the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles creates a safe space to talk about sex in all its wondrous iterations. Not so much the “birds and bees”, more the “nuts and bolts”.

The show is now available for UK and international bookings.

Inspired by real-life conversations with real-life people: puppets talk dirty

Blind Summit is a theatre company notorious for using puppets to address unlikely subjects. We encountered puppet alcoholism in their work Low Life, puppet existentialism in The Table, and puppet possession in Henry, A Ghost Story. Now, they invite audiences to dive under the covers to shed light on The Sex Lives of Puppets and try to answer some important questions, including: what do puppets look like naked? What is no strings sex? What are you doing with your hands?

The Sex Lives of Puppets is a multi-layered piece of theatre. On the surface it offers a fun and frank exploration of puppet desire at the hands of their Dionysian puppet-masters; on a deeper level it engages skilled puppetry to express human moods, fears, worries, hang-ups and desires that will immediately resonate with its audience.

Working in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene, specifically with the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (amongst the largest and most detailed scientific studies of sexual behaviour in the world), co-writers and directors Ben Keaton (Perrier Award winner, Father Ted) and Mark Down (Artistic Director of Blind Summit Theatre) take inspiration from real-life responses to lead an impish cast of improviser puppeteers, and a veritable smorgasbord of different puppets, to explore sex and humanity and, of course, to expose the underbelly of puppet eroticism.

In a series of two-hander interview scenes, a cast of puppet couples of all genders, races and ages talk about their sex lives, and the show uncovers puppet sex problems that are unquestioningly familiar. They consider subjects ranging from sexting to dating apps, online porn and sexual wellbeing, and a tale of tangled sexual relationships unfolds to reveal a snapshot of sex (both human and puppet) in contemporary Britain.