In the past few years there has been a revival in the use of puppets in mainstream theatre: Avenue Q’s X-rated Sesame Street; the subtly realised demons in Nicholas Wright’s His Dark Materials and the monumental, whinnying realism of the animals in War Horse. But one play more than any marks a true return to puppetry’s dark, transgressive roots. Jerk is a 21st-century Punch and Judy — and you really don’t want to take the children.

The diffident, boyish man sitting on a stark stage greets the audience and coyly introduces himself as David Brooks, a drug-addicted psychotic teen-murderer. He sits centre stage and re-enacts the crimes in which he has been complicit. He has a glove puppet on each hand, one a panda, one a seal. On his lap a blonde doll-like puppet lies. The panda forces itself inside the doll’s cavity. David makes monstrous squishing, gurgling noises with his mouth. The panda masturbates as the corpse puppet is assaulted.

Over the course of the next hour David (Jonathan Capdevielle) takes us on a nightmarish, but sometimes weirdly humorous, journey into his grisly offences, using puppetry, ventriloquism and the text of a fanzine, given to the audience on arrival. Jerk positions the audience as psychology students watching a prison therapy session presented by an incarcerated serial killer’s accomplice. He is exploring and explaining his crimes by presenting this graphic puppet show by way of therapy.

The show is a collaboration between the French theatre director/puppeteer/ choreographer Gisèle Vienne, Capdevielle and the American author Dennis Cooper, upon whose short story, Jerk, this has been based.

Cooper has variously been compared favourably with de Sade, Baudelaire and Genet for his dark, violent and yet strangely tender writing, which unflinchingly explores drug addicts, lost adolescents, killers and dysfunctional, marginalised characters from a largely gay perspective. He often gives first-person and chillingly sympathetic voices to the darkest of characters. Bret Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, has called him “the last literary outlaw in American fiction”.

Jerk breaks taboo after taboo — child killing, torture, necrophila — and although the therapeutic puppet show aspect is entirely imaginary, it is shockingly based on a real series of crimes. In Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s, the prolific serial killer Dean Corll, with the help of two teenagers, David Brooks and Wayne Henley, tortured, raped, mutilated and murdered more than 27 teenage boys — many from the same street and school.

Surely this is not material fit for a puppet show? Cooper disagrees. “We are not doing this for kids in the park,” he says. “Puppetry is an art form so why wouldn’t it be as appropriate for it to explore these dark areas as a novel or an adult theatre piece? Puppetry had become just a thing for children, a silly, low form, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of ambition. It had just been accepted as something for children.”

Vienne agrees and argues that Jerk returns puppetry to a medieval tradition when these types of glove puppets were invented to show and say things that actors were not allowed to. She argues that this, rather than some groups, such as the contemporary Guignol, that claim to be untraditional but actually deliver rather conservative material, is returning truthfully to the dark roots of Punch and Judy and the Grand Guignol horror theatre. Vienne says: “They could state all this subversive material without being illegal. This is how glove puppetry was used.”

However, Jerk also clearly references the modern technique of children showing criminal courts what has happened to them by using dolls. “I don’t make fun of that,” Vienne says, “because it is very good. For me though, there is some humour in it . . .

“Dolls bring a funny aspect, with their voices and how they look. Even when dolls are doing the most horrible thing it can be very funny. We think of Punch and Judy smashing a kid and feeding a body into a mincing machine. Horrible things, but when dolls do them, they are funny.”

There is indeed laughter in this show, albeit a weird, slightly uncomfortable laughter. The voices Capdevielle throws have a comic edge, and there are jarring pop references. (Dean projects on to his victims the personalities of various celebrities – Jimmy Page and Luke Halpin, from Flipper — because this makes them seem more alive to him: they are knowable, unlike his victims, who are not).

It would be all too easy to accuse Vienne and Cooper of being sick and twisted, but there lurk a surprising morality and sense of propriety guiding the work.

Vienne finds herself shocked by the coverage that cases such as Corll’s generate and how the media give detail that moves far beyond simple news value and into prurience. Indeed, if you search the internet for information about the Corll murders, within seconds it is possible to find film of bodies being dragged from their graves on the beach. “It feeds the perverse, in a hypocritical way,” she says. But the puppets give both the character and the audience the distance to be able really to explore their thoughts and feelings.

“People say to Dennis or me: ‘How can you do work about such horrible topics?’ I do it for national health. I am interested in an honest approach. We all sometimes have bad thoughts, but the bad thought doesn’t mean bad action. We accept that we are all haunted and that we are all more or less perverts. To be able to face these bad thoughts honestly is the important thing.”

Jerk is at the South London Gallery, SE5 (www.southlondongallery.org; 020-7703 9799), July 1-3

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