Nina Conti  is a ventriloquist, best known for her performances with a small glove puppet, “Monkey”. YouTube offers many recordings, of which this BBC recording is an excellent example, and her own channel offers a wealth of material. The film, “Her Master's Voice”, largely a reflection on her teacher Ken Campbell, is available on Prime Video and is worth the price.

All of this material, without exception, is apparently slight, yet is also compelling, intellectually intriguing and emotionally exhausting. This is hard to explain. Ventriloquism is a narrowly limited art, a fact to which Conti repeatedly alludes, and she is not even at the technical peak of this skill, as comparison with several of the other ventriloquists interviewed in “Her Master’s Voice” plainly shows. Of this, Conti is aware, referring to herself as an “amateur”, an exaggeration we can dismiss with the fairer judgment that while a professional of a high order, she is far from the slickest exponent of the voice trick. Yet she is manifestly and undoubtedly vastly superior in some other sense. Conti may be only a very good ventriloquist, but she has a dramatic genius. We can see this not only in the invention and delivery of the dialogue, which is, deft, authentic and convincingly suggests two personalities, but also, and conclusively, in the culmination of her stage act, which is not even ventriloquism, but the assumption of a voice in the pretence that Monkey has taken control of her body. In this final scene, she simply goes ape, as anyone could, you or I included, and yet in the context of the whole ventriloqual sequence, which sets the stage for this moment and so finds its ultimate justification, it is a theatrical tour de force. How can this be, and what is going on in the observer to make this so surprisingly and peculiarly effective?

That there is philosophy behind all this, is quite true. Conti rather charmingly claims to have forgotten all she learned at university, UEA as it happens, and to have found Kant too hard, but for travel reading when at a ventriloquism conference in Kentucky she takes Bernard Williams’ Problems of the Self. She is an intellectual. But the prime mover in Conti's act, the gradient that provides all of its energy, is not abstract or conceptual, but her personal, emotional, and physical fragility. Whether this is grounded in reality or just cunningly projected, I do not presume to say, and note only that this touching weakness is bait, largely for the male viewer, and a good bait too. She is as a result powerfully attractive, much more so than is otherwise explicable by her interesting face, flowing hair and healthy figure. She stimulates in men a protective desire like no other female performer of any kind I can think of, and this is once again something of which she is very well aware, Monkey in one conversation mocking the fact that the demographic of her fan mail is made up largely of later middle-aged males (this short essay is another instance).

One might take up the old Avengers joke and say that she has an overwhelming “M-Appeal” which in this case would be Monkey-Appeal. For the Monkey puppet is the surrogate offered to the entranced audience of suitors, driven on by the, of course deluded, belief that they and no other can provide the tender and redemptive intimacy that will both protect her and banish the mysterious sadness of her solitude, a honey-trap conventional in literature and in life. But this is a rare example of a fictional romantic, or fantastic sexual coupling where the observer does not resent the depicted male actor, whose character men detest in fiction and whose face they loathe to see in pictorial erotica. Instead, that observer projects himself fully into the personality of the imagined male sexual partner, in this case a monkey doll. Paradoxically, this assertive male avatar is not only small and impotent, Monkey would doubtless describe himself as “dickless”, but humiliatingly fisted by his female operator, an indignity which he explicitly experiences as both pleasure and pain. However, the subordination is temporary and after a prolonged struggle, stretching through the gig and indeed over the gigs of many years, Monkey insistently exercises his will via abuse and wit, with the female ultimately overcome in a psychological copulation during which the monkey’s personality penetrates the woman to her furthest extremities. Monkey’s voice leaves the puppet, migrating at first to and speaking from Conti’s bare hand – “Don’t you like me naked?” he asks – and then briefly alongside her consciousness before taking full possession of mouth, face, voice, hands, arms and legs.

In this remarkable money shot Conti adopts a simian crouch, her fingers grasping lasciviously at the air as the monkey exercises his new muscular powers. He is alive. The eyes focus on the world with a fierce desire not at all hers, and Conti’s beauty is horribly inflected, the coarse, masculine voice incongruous with the elegant legs and breasts wrapped in a pretty dress, all points over which the monkey gloats in a triumph reminiscent of Mr Punch at his most brutal and conceited. After this simultaneous theatrical climax of impersonation both are utterly spent, there is nothing more for either to say, to each other or to anyone, and they can only leave the stage in silence. But the spirit of Monkey is irrepressible.