A blog post by Mark Down, Artistic Director and co-founder of Blind Summit
What I learned from making The Sex Lives of Puppets is that this subject – sex – that we are all a bit afraid of talking about, well, the more you do talk about it, the more you realise that what you are really talking about is love. And there really is nothing to be afraid of.
We had one safeguarding rule, when we were rehearsing the show, that if anyone felt uncomfortable, upset or triggered by anything that was happening, then they could just say so and we would stop the rehearsal, take a break, and then think what to do.
We said the rule out loud every morning to remind ourselves, and we never had to use it.
In fact it was mostly the opposite, we found that no one would shut up about it. Everyone loved talking about sex. Or rather they loved making the puppets talk about sex.
Why, I wonder.
The puppets were frank, filthy, funny, and surprisingly emotionally mature. They could hardly be described as attractive but they are, as the New York Times said, “oddly adorable”. They literally cannot have sex. They are pillows. They have no “bits”. And yet, when they are talking about their sex lives they appear completely candid and to be telling the truth. Even though their stories are outlandish.
And so, guided by the puppets, and with our one safeguarding rule in place, we really went there. We got into affairs, fetishes, felatio, hook ups, hang ups and heartaches. We made a puppet orgy and a shadow puppet porn sequence. We made the puppets have sex, and we let them talk.
We knew we had to shock a little. People would be expecting that. We knew we wanted to make people laugh. And we knew we wanted to represent ordinary, everyday sex in all its wonderful, messy glory.
Our only concern when making decisions was do we believe the characters are real? Do they interest us? Do they move the story forward? Do they move us?
The show is filthy and yet also somehow wholesome. It is about sex as it really is. Sex that people are having all the time. Weird, wonderful and commonplace. Necessary and unnecessary. Wild and not so wild. Central to their lives and revealing their frailty.
And yes it is embarrassing. Even now, after doing the show for more than two years, I find it harder to talk about the show, and what happens in the show, than actually to do the show. Without a puppet in my hands it doesn’t land in the same way.
One of the strange things we have discovered is that psychiatrists seem to love this show. A friend of mine in London who is a psychiatrist was the first to become a fan. He and his wife came twice (hoho!), and brought friends. Then we had a super-fan who came half a dozen times. He was a forensic psychiatrist and he just seemed to get it. And when we were touring in San Francisco someone came up to me and told me it was the best show he’d ever seen. He was a retired psychiatrist! That’s when I noticed the pattern and I asked him why it might be that the show appealed to psychiatrists. He said, “I’ll tell you why. It’s because you understand the most important thing, that the “F-word” is “feelings”.”
Catch The Sex Lives of Puppets at the Theatre Royal on 29 and 30 Jun