Five Questions on Works From the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with the Creative Director of The Sex Lives of Puppets

Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe takes place each August and draws daring, experimental, and genre-defying performances from around the world. A slice of that creative energy comes to Stanford Live this season, as three Fringe-acclaimed productions make their way to campus. Spanning theater and performance art, these works address social issues and difficult topics—including burnout, women’s mental health, and sexuality—with a healthy dose of artistic risk and bold humor.

The London-based Blind Summit’s The Sex Lives of Puppets (February 18–21) is a vulnerable exploration of pleasure and desire.

We connected with Blind Summit's creative-creator, Mark Down, to find out more.

What can the audience expect from your show? 

Mark Down (Creative Director of Blind Summit Theater, The Sex Lives of Puppets): It’s obviously a rude subject, and I hope we deliver on being rude. But oddly, when you talk about sex, what you really end up talking about is love and relationships. So the show is really about the many ways that people navigate love, and how sex is at the center of that. It’s inclusive of all kinds of puppet sex, and it’s funny. But it’s also very moving, and sort of life affirming. I mean, there is some graphic puppet porn—but most of it is puppets talking about their sex lives.

Tell me about your background and company.

Mark Down: Originally I set up Blind Summit around 1997 with the puppet-maker Nick Barnes. Puppets were very unpopular back then, even more marginal than they are now. So we just had a mission to try and make theater with puppets. I’m still doing it 28 years later. We often work with casts—so several people on one puppet. The heads have a moving mouth, and are attached to simple bodies that are just made out of stuffing.

How did you develop your current show?

Mark Down: Originally we had a show called Citizen Puppet, and the idea was to do a documentary or verbatim-style theater. It seemed like a really interesting thing to do—to make puppets talk about their backstory, or their offstage life, which of course doesn’t exist. Along the way, the cast messed around with the puppets, saying rude things, and then I came up with the title, The Sex Lives of Puppets. I got in touch with a professor at the London School of Hygiene, who turned out to be an author on the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. That became the basis for what we improvised and re-improvised in a puppetized way. Our designer on this show is Russell Dean, and we have a really interesting process where we’re matching heads to bodies, finding costumes, recasting, and we go back and forth until we get it right. The puppets have to look like they mean it.

What’s it like at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?

Mark Down: I just got back from my 25th Edinburgh, and it’s a super insane, insane event. It really wears you out—I mean, you’re physically exhausted, exhilarated, depressed. There’s all sorts of massive challenges, like you have just 15 minutes to set up your show and 15 minutes to take it down at the end. It’s so mad.

What do you hope the audience will take away from your work?

Mark Down: Sex in entertainment is usually with very sexy people, but these are puppets, and puppets can’t be sexy. So they speak for us very ordinary people. My dad saw it and sat next to my brother and my brother’s 15-year-old boy, three generations. I think that was a little painful at times—he’s Catholic and pretty shy about talking about sex—but in the end he was really unembarrassed by it. I think that is a great thing.

Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe series generously sponsored by The Aufmuth Family.