Jeremy rubs his nipples and calls Meryl’s vagina “David Schwimmer”. She has dubbed his todger Roger – which also happens to be her husband’s name. Frannie wishes Harry would get his grammar right when he talks dirty to her. Clive is about to get “stuck in” at a Las Vegas orgy when his wife calls with news of a lump in her breast.
These are the sex lives of puppets. Or rather, the sex lives of (mostly older) people as told by actor-puppeteers. Blind Summit’s production is based on findings from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. It is staged in verbatim-style chapters, mostly with solo or duo interviewees answering questions such as “what’s your secret sauce?” and “is it important that people find you attractive?”
The show, from Mark Down and Ben Keaton (who co-write and direct), is thereby more groin-gazing than navel, literally so when flame-haired Meryl and trim-bearded Jeremy thrust out their crotches. Their beady expressions are intensified by the accompanying goggle eyes of all four puppeteers (Down, Isobel Griffiths, Briony O’Callaghan and Dale Wylde).
This kaleidoscope of carnality is interspersed with musical selections including ooh-la-la chanson, Air’s Sexy Boy and Taylor Swift’s Lover, which precedes a story of a care home ridden with gonorrhoea. There is plenty of earthy titillation about fellating, masturbating and edging (how about fracking, one of them asks). The gags are variable and some of these sketches run out of steam en route to a mock-operatic orgiastic finale.
Most of these puppets remain dressed although there is a hilarious moment when Harry gets it on with Frannie and calls to his operators for help. (“Somebody lift my legs up! Pants! Get my pants!”) But Blind Summit are not just fooling around. These bunraku-inspired puppets, designed by Russell Dean, can be haunting: cheater Clive’s hollow, self-pitying expression as he laments his ruined Vegas jaunt; widower Dimitri nuzzling his partner Robin like a cat, disclosing how much he longed to be touched after his wife died.
The documentary theatre show La Vie Secrète des Vieux, now touring Europe, gains greater depth and comedy by inviting older people on stage themselves to speak with startling frankness about their sexuality. By contrast there are a few too many easy laughs here; these puppets could be yet more emotionally penetrating.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August. Then at Southwark Playhouse, London, 4-28 September
