Review: THE SEX LIVES OF PUPPETS, Southwark Playhouse

A show about puppets and sex? There are some obvious gags here, not least are their relationships based on “no strings”? Thankfully, Blind Summit artistic director Mark Down and his co-director and co-writer Ben Keaton eschew the corny and porny in this series of emotive vignettes.

The stories presented by this “punk puppetry” company are in the form of “Creature Comforts”-style interviews where we are only fed the names of those speaking and a line of text before we are thrust into tales covering a panorama of erotic activity from a highly diverse panel.

While sex is well known as a means for creating families, many may not consider this a family show (at least for the very young 'uns). The swearing is minimal but the detail occasionally veers on the graphic, there’s a real rainbow of sexual preferences and there is no shortage of kink-faming: furries, orgiasts, voyeurs and submissives will all find something to relate to here.

The  combination of puppets and sex is hardly novel - Avenue Q’s voluminous bonking scene and West End hit Puppetry Of The Penis come to mind - but Down and Keaton (with advice from Chris Bonnell, Professor of Public Health and Sociology) go far beyond those two factors to portray this engaging panoply of human behaviour. The balance of pleasure is explored from the selfish and onanistic to the compersive. The impact of mental health - not least grief, low libidos and depression - is considered, as is the flexible and mutable nature of love and lust. While some of the stories arrive with full-frontal intensity, others are teased out to a dark finale like xx-rated episodes of Black Mirror. 

The solo puppets regale us with monologues that Alan Bennett would give his last Yorkshire teabag for. The actress Suki relays how her disastrous flirtation with a colleague ended in a firm rejection from him and an extreme reaction from her. The older Tina with her sharply cut white hair and thick Armani shades explains why she eventually gave up having her husband huffing and puffing atop her and instead chose to rely on something that gave her true satisfaction (as long as the batteries don’t run out).

Subtitled “describe your sex life of an avant garde monologue”, one segment sees a man put forward the case for self-choking and, presumably during a session of auto-erotic asphyxiation, is seen floating his way back to the womb. Meanwhile, another interviewee opens up about a planned Vegas gangbang that is disrupted by a disturbing phone call from home. 

The couples, on the other hand, hold forth with finely honed and filthy badinage. We meet Marcus and Preston, two pensioners who are having sex 24/7 in their care home; the latter’s dentures are a permanent fixture on his side table thanks to his new-found love for blowjobs. Meryl and Jeremy - married, albeit not to each other - have more than a little of Googlebox’s Mary and Giles about them as they ecstatically tell us what they named each other’s privates.

Most touching of all is Dimitri and Robin who met after the former lost his wife and fell into a pit of loneliness (“I just wanted to be touched”). They met when he came round to help her with her plumbing (not a euphemism) and the pair now have their own sexual dynamic: she org*sms as she masturbates him, while he likes nothing better than to pretend to be a cat.

The set design for the most part is a basic setup of a table and a backdrop but the lighting is effectively used to draw attention away from the puppeteers towards their chatty subjects. There’s also, just before the interval, a brilliantly fun piece of shadowplay: through quick switches of the spotlight, a bewildering array of naughty images are displayed one after the other to create a rather sexy sequence. 

An important plus to this production is that it stands as a firm counterpoint to the teachings of Andrew Tate and his incel followers who believe, firstly, that women primarily hanker after men with money, abs and fast cars and, secondly, that men lacking those are destined to remain single forever. Every episode here defies that narrative and presents a far more realistic view on modern relationships without preaching.

Blind Summit's The Sex Lives Of Puppets is an intelligent and thought-provoking study that is as much to do with what's between our ears as what's between our legs. Is it too early to start talking about the best shows of the year? Maybe, but, even though we are less than a fortnight into 2024, this will likely find a spot in my favourites of 2024.

The Sex Lives Of Puppets continues at Southwark Playhouse until 13 January.

Photo credit: Nigel Bewley

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