Blind Summit have won acclaim at the Fringe a number of times with shows like ‘The Table’ and ‘Citizen Puppet’. This year they present ‘The Sex Lives Of Puppets’, a frank exploration of real-life sexual scenarios, illustrated and explored by puppets, which definitely sounds intriguing.

It is written and directed by Mark Down, Blind Summit’s Artistic Director, and Ben Keaton, actor and past Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, and was informed by the National Survey Of Sexual Attitudes And Lifestyles.

Following a short run at the Southwark Playhouse in London earlier this year, it is being performed at the Pleasance this Festival. I spoke to Mark to find out more about the show, the puppets and Blind Summit.

CC: Tell us about ‘The Sex Lives Of Puppets’ – what can people expect from this show?
MD: Prepare yourselves for fourteen puppet characters, seven puppet couples and a puppet orgy. It’s filthy, funny, educational and heartwarming.

The puppets talk frankly about their sex lives, using text researched with the National Survey Of Sexual Attitudes And Lifestyles – or NATSAL – re-improvised in verbatim “interview” style.

It’s sort of ‘Creature Comforts’-meets-‘Gogglebox’-meets-sex-therapy. And, of course, being Blind Summit, maximum effort has been spent to deliver it in the form of exquisite, realistic, touchingly real-life puppetry.

CC: Where did the idea come from to make a puppet show exploring these themes?
MD: It really came from the puppets. Blind Summit’s process is to “follow the puppet”, which means that the puppets sort of tell us what show they want to make.

These puppets have been around for a while – the first one was made in 2012 – and they have been in lots of different productions, including ‘Citizen Puppet’, which was at the Fringe in 2015 and won a Fringe First, but we had a feeling that they still had more to say.

Eventually we got them to talk about sex and they wouldn’t shut up. So we had to make the show.

CC: What process did you go through in creating the show? What role did the London School Of Hygiene and the aforementioned NATSAL play?
MD: So when we realised that we had to make the show, then I realised we had to find out what we were talking about.

So I contacted Professor Chris Bonell at the London School Of Hygiene, who is one of the authors of the NATSAL and he shared lots of their results and research.

We weren’t allowed to use the material directly for confidentiality reasons but we read hours of interviews to get a feeling for what people say about their sex lives and we used it to create characters and write the scenes in the show.

The result, we hope, is a snapshot of puppet sex in contemporary Britain, with all their eccentricity, hilarity, complexity and ordinariness.

CC: What were some of the most surprising things you learned through the process of creating the show?
MD: The audience reaction has been much bigger than we expected. I hope it will continue.

One of the biggest things that we discovered was that people want to talk about sex more than we thought. It is central to our lives, of course it is, but most of us don’t talk about it as if it is.

We had a rule in rehearsals that if anyone was upset by anything that anyone said we would stop whatever we were doing. This never happened! Everyone loved talking about it. I wonder if the puppets were our facilitators in a way.

One of the things about the puppets is that they really can’t be sexy, but they are really good at talking about sex. They demystify it somehow, and make it accessible, palatable, and sort of ordinary.

I don’t know for sure if that is why it is – we are still learning – but the puppets allow you to listen to things that might otherwise be excruciating.

But like I say, we are still learning, so please come tell us what you think.

CC: So, do you think the format of a puppet show enables you to achieve something special with the themes you are covering?
MD: Yes I do think so. From people’s reactions to the show. I don’t know exactly why. There is something about the puppets that is both funny and very touching.

You laugh but you still take them seriously for some reason. My dad came to see it and he said, “Well that would have been awful with real people”.

When we were making the show we were mainly interested in what made the puppets most alive and we followed that. So when we discovered it was sex we latched onto it.

It was only later that we started to wonder why it makes them so alive. And we started to think about what they should say. But it is still largely mysterious to me. The puppets really are in charge.

CC: How did the partnership with Ben come about? What have your respective roles been?
MD: We met when Ben came to an open audition for Blind Summit. He kept saying that he couldn’t do any puppetry, but he liked sex. He would tell you he found the puppetry difficult but he had a wonderful voice and he did some great improvisations with them.

Six months later when we were arranging two more weeks of rehearsal with the NATSAL questionnaires I invited him along. I didn’t really know where it would lead. He came to be a puppeteer but, at the end of the workshop, we decided to write and direct the show together. From there on we worked on everything together.

Ben is a writer, performer and designer, and I am a bit of everything too. We worked together by improvising with the cast in workshops and then writing together on Zoom calls. Then we would meet with the cast again.

We have slightly different approaches but we were always clear of the same goal – to make a show which was funny, touching, and in which the puppets were truly alive.

CC: Tell us more about Blind Summit Theatre, its mission and history to date.
MD: Blind Summit was founded in 1997 by Nick Barnes and myself. At the time puppetry was not very popular in theatre although there were a few shining exceptions – ‘The Lion King’ for example.

We wanted to make shows where puppets carried the story. This meant a lot of experimentation, a lot of mad ideas, and a lot of disasters and the odd successful moment. We were adopted by BAC for a while and made a show called ‘Low Life’ which came to the Fringe in 2004.

Then we worked on a production of ‘Madam Butterfly’ at ENO with the late Anthony Minghella. We made a puppet version of Madam Butterfly’s baby. The show has been very successful and is still running in Vienna, in Lithuania and at the Met in New York.

We did a few other high profile jobs like that, but the core of our work are the shows we make ourselves from scratch like ‘The Table’, which premiered at the Fringe in 2011, and ‘Citizen Puppet’ in 2015.

‘The Sex Lives Of Puppets’ will be our seventh Fringe show.

CC: What have been some of the stand-out moments while creating shows through Blind Summit Theatre?
MD: To pick out just a few. Directing a puppet team for the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony operating a 90ft high Voldemort puppet was pretty exciting.

Performing ‘Pirate Puppetry’ on the Royal Mile in 2003 when we learned that you need a good “close” to survive as a street performer, because 500 people disappear very quickly when you ask for money.

There was the first time that a puppet broke in a performance, her foot fell off, and the audience loved it and we realised that things going wrong in a show is even better than things going right.

We performed ‘The Table’ in an open air amphitheatre in Galicia in Northern Spain. But perhaps the best one was finding two people snogging in the back row at the end of ‘The Sex Lives Of Puppets’ at Southwark Playhouse in January.

CC: Has the use of puppetry in live performance – and the way audiences connect with the artform – changed since you started Blind Summit?
MD: Yes. Massively. Unbelievably so. And at the same time not really.

There is lots more puppetry and lots more puppeteers. The puppetry is being done better and it is taken more seriously. There are lots of giant puppets walking through towns. Audiences are loving them, and people understand that a puppet can be more than Punch & Judy or the Muppets – both of which are great!

On the other hand, I think audiences always loved the puppetry in the work of Complicite, Improbable, Walley Range Allstars, Faulty Optic, Horse and Bamboo etc etc. So it isn’t completely new.

It is very gratifying that people are recognising a demand for it and enjoying it, but I still think puppetry has a lot more potential. I really hope the interest will continue and that puppeteers will continue to innovate and develop.

CC: You published a ‘Practical Guide To Puppetry’ a couple of years ago, what motivated you to write that?
MD: It was something that I had wanted to do for a long time. At Blind Summit we really taught ourselves a puppetry technique to do it the way we wanted to see it done. We were really interested in character and in improvisation, not as ends in themselves, but as a way of making puppetry that was incredibly alive.

Over the years I developed a method of working with performers that comes from understanding the relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer. I find it a very satisfying way to perform because it really channels acting into the puppets.

So when I had the chance to capture it in a book I jumped at it. And it came just before the COVID lockdown so the timing was very good!

CC: Why did you decide to bring this show to the Edinburgh Fringe?
MD: The reaction from the audience in London was very exciting and it immediately felt like an Edinburgh Show.

Anthony Alderson from the Pleasance, who has been a supporter of Blind Summit for a long time, came to see it and was very excited by it.

He said, “You’ve done it again, it’s taken you ten years but you’ve done it again!” And he asked us to come to the Pleasance. It is always a hard invitation to resist.

CC: What are you planning on doing in Edinburgh when not performing your show?
MD: Play tennis! And flyering of course. And I always try to see lots of the other shows if I can.

‘The Sex Lives Of Puppets’ was performed at Pleasance Courtyard at Edinburgh Festival 2024.

LINKS: www.blindsummit.com | x.com/1blindsummit