The Sex Lives of Puppets

​Earlier this year, puppet masters Blind Summit Theatre’s latest creation, The Sex Lives of Puppets, launched with a sell out run and rave reviews at Southwark Playhouse. The show that pulls back the covers on puppet sex in contemporary Britain then took the Edinburgh Festival Fringe by storm, followed by a second Southwark Playhouse run in September 2024. The show is now available for UK and international bookings. 

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 wonderous iterations. Not so much the “birds and bees”, more the “nuts and bolts”.

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, offering a fun and frank exploration of puppet desire at the hands of their Dionysian puppet-masters, and on a deeper level engaging 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 - which is amongst the largest and most detailed scientific studies of sexual behaviour in the world - co-writers / 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 in which a cast of puppet couples of all genders, races and ages, talk about their sex lives, the show uncovers puppet sex problems that are unquestioningly familiar. They consider subjects ranging from sexting, to dating apps, to online porn and sexual wellbeing, a tale of tangled sexual relationships unfolds to reveal a snapshot of sex (both human and puppet) in contemporary Britain.