Malmö Dockteater, Sweden's only puppet theatre for adults, has adapted Jackie Collins's debut novel The World Is Full of Married Men into an experimental production featuring anatomically enhanced Barbie dolls engaged in explicit sex scenes. The show, performed in Swedish with English subtitles, runs at the newly refurbished Yard theatre in east London from 21 July to 1 August.
Explicit Puppetry for Adult Audiences
Director Erik Holmström explains the concept: "I had this dream of making a show where an audience sits together and secretly becomes a bit horny. You don't expect it from a puppet theatre." The production uses reconstructed Barbie dolls with real hair pubic areas and drilled crotches to faithfully depict the novel's graphic content, which was banned in several countries upon its 1968 release.
Performer and puppeteer Kajsa Ericsson holds up a headless Barbie with a full bush and tiny hole, noting they wanted to honour Collins's famously explicit style. "If Jackie is telling us to do that, we do that," Holmström says.
Open-Plan Puppeteering
The show merges theatre, film, and sexually active puppets with an open setup where the audience sees everything: the two puppeteers (Ericsson and Erik Olsson), videographer Josefin Beischer capturing miniature action live on a large screen, and the mechanics of puppeteering. "That's one of the reasons I started our puppet theatre," Holmström says. "You can see the glue, the screws. We work with openness, with making things visible."
Malmö Dockteater began in a basement workshop in 2015 and has created hi-tech, low-budget shows across genres, including existentialist robot productions and toilet-paper-tube puppets for Dante's Inferno. Holmström believes puppets offer a unique way to explore sex: "If you do sex scenes on stage with humans, it's maybe embarrassing, maybe shocking. But you can use puppets to look at sex in a different way."
Modern Relevance of Collins's Novel
Collins's novel captures the sordid glamour of the swinging 60s, focusing on a man's affair amid the predatory film industry. Olsson was struck by its modern feel: "It was written more than 50 years ago, but it was so up to date," he says, noting parallels with #MeToo-era revelations. The novel's obsession with sex, bodies, and beauty made dolls a perfect medium, with Collins herself describing a character's face as "like that of a beautiful, but quite blank, painted doll."
Fiddly Blocking and DIY Aesthetics
Blocking intricate sex scenes with dolls proved challenging. "In the beginning it was really frustrating, because they couldn't do the simplest things, like pick up a phone or open a door," Ericsson says. But over time, the dolls gained ease of movement. "It came to the point where it was almost like they started to live by themselves. They came to life."
The show's many mini-parts posed packing challenges. When the production moved to Stockholm, a misplaced tongue—just a few millimetres on a stick—caused a panic on opening night. Holmström's DIY aesthetic allowed a replacement to be cobbled together from a junk drawer. "I like when the audience think they could go home and make their own," he says.
Funding and International Reach
Malmö Dockteater has led the growth of adult puppetry in Sweden over the last decade, with state and city funding increasing year on year. Holmström describes their financial position as "quite safe, but always with a small budget." London's Yard theatre, which has doubled in size, received support from the Swedish Arts Council to host the show. This commitment helps bring experimental international work to British stages, where funds and risk appetite are often limited.
The World Is Full of Married Men is at the Yard theatre, London, 21 July to 1 August.
