'Hand to God' is a satire full of sock and awe that makes 'Book of Mormon' look tame

The Broadway hit is coming to London. Matt Trueman meets its creator

Glove story: Steven Boyer with Tyrone

Forget about the devil on your shoulder. Worry about the one on your left hand. In Hand to God, one of the most surprising Broadway shows in a long while, Satan appears as a sock puppet.

Robert Askins' satire is set in a Christian puppet ministry – a church class where kids enact Bible stories through puppetry – only for one of the darned things to be possessed by the Devil. Jason, son of the class leader, is led by his left hand, now going by the name of Tyrone, into a trail of blasphemy, destruction and filth. Hello Kitty toys are impaled, blood pouring from their eyes, and believe me, there's no unseeing two puppets pounding away, making the sock with two heels.

You might have heard of Hand to God. It has arguably the most famous plug socket in theatre history. This summer, a 19-year-old jumped up onstage to charge his iPhone, not quite clocking how theatre works, and caused a social media surge – half uproar, half ridicule. Who knows whether it was a stunt or not, but two months later, following new stories worldwide, Hand to God announced a West End run for February next year.

It will have come a long way. Askins' play started not just off, but off-off-Broadway in 2011, opening at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Hell's Kitchen: “Seventy-eight seats and dirty as you wanna be,” says the 35-year-old playwright. The not-for-profit had recently lost its artistic director. Suddenly, EST had a cult hit on its hands.

Fast forward four years and Hand to God was taking nearly $500,000 a week on Broadway. It's the equivalent of a pub theatre piece landing smack in the middle of Shaftesbury Avenue – something Askins thinks should happen more often. “Sometimes we let ourselves get away with a very easy cultural cynicism and say, 'This is or isn't commercial. This is or isn't Broadway.' People are just hungry for good work, whatever it looks like. They don't want to be condescended to. They want to be talked to like adults. They like to laugh.”

Askins talks 10 to the dozen, often scathingly, and his speech comes well-seasoned with swear words. Of his first 12 plays, nine went underproduced and, before Hand to God took off, he'd earned a mere $7,500 from his writing. When it opened on Broadway, he was working in a Brooklyn Tex-Mex. It's since grossed $10m – and writers' royalties can be up to seven per cent. Not bad for a guy from Waco, Texas, who had seen “almost no professional theatre” growing up.

“I was an aggressive high school nihilist, just very big into nothingness,” he says. Hand to God looks like folly, but it is borderline autobiography. His mother ran a puppet ministry and, like Jason, Askins lost his father at the age of 16. “That really threw my world into tumult.”

Close your eyes to the whole possession thing and it's actually a startling portrait of mental illness. Essentially, Jason has a breakdown via a sock puppet. “A lot of addicts respond really well to the play, because there's a voice in his head that compels him to do things he doesn't want to do.”

Askins has his own experiences of that. At college, he was “an angry drunk”, writing to push buttons, sometimes for a satirical magazine, sometimes for the stage. His first play was a “very violent spiritual allegory called Broken, and it caused so much trouble. There's a line in the Apostles' Creed that says Jesus, after he dies, descends into hell. I was like, what? That's never explored in the iconography: Jesus in hell. I wrote it as a prison love story – lights up on a cell and, to be perfectly honest, the Devil's just finished having sex with Jesus.”

You can see how that might raise a stink. “I was 22. I was pissed off.”

The controversy caught the eye of the EST and Askins got himself a week's developmental workshop. He ended up staying for an entire summer –making beds and cooking breakfasts just to stick around. Afterwards, he “went back to Waco, bartended for a month, sold my car and moved to New York”.

Believe it or not, Christian puppet ministry is a thing in America. Apparently, it's on the up in the UK as well. Unsurprisingly, Askins is pretty scathing. “Christians in the South who put puppets on their hands and say the word of God? What the hell is that? ”

YouTube suggests it's like a Christian rock concert performed by the cast of Sesame Street. “Look,” says Askins, “American churches are always looking for a thing to solve the problem of their irrelevance. Why aren't people coming? Let's put a gym in. Let's buy a Starbucks. Let's get some puppets in here.”

Puppets can be powerful things, though our culture has turned them into children's toys. Tyrone, Hand to God's baying bobby sock, starts out cutesy – bobbled grey felt and a goofy smile – before turning into a terror. His stick-on eyes dilate. He grows teeth. He is, director Moritz von Stuelpnagel says, the reason audiences give in to the show: “A little imp that can liberate us and unlock our latent impulses.”

I'd argue that Hand to God works because it resituates a brilliant variety in a 21st-century framework. Steven Boyer, who plays Jason in New York, is virtuosic in the part. He sells Tyrone completely, until there's no question in your mind that this talking sock is master of its own destiny. “He's speaking the lines of one role while his facial expressions are reacting to those lines,” says Von Stuelpnagel. “That's a performance challenge unlike any other.”

'Hand to God' is at Vaudeville Theatre, London, from 5 February