Remembering Ben Keaton

Projects are collaborations.  They happen through collaboration, by collaboration and because of collaboration. A good collaboration makes you look forward to turning up, keeps you on track, helps you focus on what is important. It's a kind of friendship with a purpose. In a way it's the best kind of friendships. And you realise afterwards that the collaboration is actually what the project was. Ben Keaton collaborated with me on The Sex Lives Of Puppets. He was one of the best. 

Ben Keaton, who co-wrote and co-directed The Sex Lives Of Puppets, died on 20 March 2026 at the age of 69.

I met Ben when he came to an audition in June 2022.

He stood out straight away because he was dressed differently to the rest of us, in a jacket and jeans and polished Brogues. He always wore Brogues. 

Then he did some puppetry and we heard his voice. Wow, he had a great voice. Rich, dark, crisp. Not something you often hear in a puppet audition, or indeed anywhere. 

He wasn't a puppeteer, he told me, he was just interested to see what we were up to.

And he was sort of famous. He won a Perrier Award in 1986 for his one person show, and he'd been in Father Ted, Casualty, the original Animal Crackers on the West End. He was friends with Suzy Izzard.  
Almost a year later he joined us to start working on The Sex Lives Of Puppets. None of us knew what the project was at the beginning and his enthusiasm for it was a vital part of making it happen. 

Ben was interested by the puppets, by the puppetry, by the idea. He was determined that we should get into the embarrassing parts of sex, into the funny parts, and into the honest parts, and the touching parts. He really wasn't a puppeteer but he was a great performer with lots of experience and he wouldn't give up. At the end of the second week, at the end of a frustrating day, when we were really at a loss as to what to do next, Ben picked up a puppet and improvised a monologue. I did the puppet's arms, and he  did the voice. And out came a four minute monologue, in the style of Harold Pinter, about a man at an orgy in Las Vegas with "the lads", who gets a phone call from his wife, telling him she's got cancer. It was funny, then shocking, then moving. It came out in one go, four minutes long, and when he finished the room was silent. 

That was the first time we felt Sex Lives might work. That we might have something to say. That the puppets might be able to say it. 

The monologue became "Clive's Monologue", also known as "orgy man" and ended up in the show almost exactly as it was improvised.  

Ben wrote brilliantly funny dialogue, he was constantly coming up with new lines, he pushed us to be ruder, naughtier, riskier, warmer.

He had great taste, he had a designer's eye, and a comedian's obsession with jokes. He was a brilliant performer and improviser. He was a musician, he composed music on his computer that is part of the soundtrack of the show. He was kind and generous and funny. When he argued it was always about making the work better. He loved a pint after rehearsals. He was an artist.

He would say about the show, "It still works for me, I don't know why, but it works..."

We talked on the phone a week or two before he died. I was just back from touring the show for 6 weeks in America,. I told him about the standing ovations, the awkward silences, how well his punchlines had landed with audiences there. The Americans loved his punchlines.  

I feel so lucky to have met Ben and worked with him. I thought we would do more together. I thought I would see him more. I can't believe he's gone.

Mark Down 13.4.26