“I dreamed of a show where the audience would get horny”: a Swedish doll play starring funny Barbie dolls | Dolls

eRick Holmstrom holds a naked, headless Ken doll. Most of the figure is as you would expect: lean muscles, smooth skin. But underneath, something is different. Between those hairless thighs is a small plastic rod nestled in a tuft of hair. “It’s real poetry,” says Holmstrom, director of Malmö Dockteater (which means “puppet theatre” in Swedish). Artist and puppeteer Kajsa Eriksson steps in Pubic “Hair,” she explains.

This doll isn’t just a prop for the company’s new show; He’s one of the stars. The Malmö Dockteater Company has adapted Jackie Collins’s debut novel, The World Is Full of Married Men, into an experimental puppet production that fearlessly jumps into the explicit sex scenes that led to the novel being banned in several countries when it was first published in 1968. Following performances in Malmö and Stockholm, the company is taking the show to the newly renovated Yard Theater in east London, where it will be shown in Swedish with English subtitles.

Collins’s salacious world is presented in miniature: the elaborate set contains 14 dollhouses, where two puppeteers (who also play in the show and act as life-sized versions of their own dolls) conjure the motion of the occupants jumping on the bed with reconstructed Barbie dolls.

“I had this dream of doing a show where the audience sits together and it becomes a little bit of a sexy secret,” Holmstrom says. “You wouldn’t expect that from a puppet theatre.” He picks up a decapitated Barbie with a full bush and a small hole drilled in her genitals. Collins was known for being graphic in her romance novels and they didn’t want to let her down on stage. “If Jackie tells us to do it, we do it,” Holmstrom shrugs.

Fusing theatre, film and sexually active puppets, nothing in this production is hidden from the viewer. We can see the actors (Ericsson and Erik Olsson) moving the puppets. They are joined by videographer Josephine Becher, whose camera captures the mini-event up close and is broadcast live on a big screen. The setting allows the audience to see everything: the humans, the puppets, as well as the physical act of moving the puppets.

“This is one of the reasons I decided to create our own puppet theater,” Holmstrom says of the open-plan display arrangement. “I was very interested in mechanics.” He likes to show the hand pulling the string or holding the support. “You can see the glue and the screws,” he says. “We work openly, and we make things visible.”

Puppet shows are often associated with family theatre; Malmö Docteater wants to expand its appeal. The company began in a basement workshop in Malmö in 2015, and remains the only adult puppet theater in Sweden. Over the past decade, they’ve created high-tech, low-budget shows across genres, from existential productions featuring robots and massive dinosaur heads to homages to “Dante’s Inferno” with splattered puppets made out of toilet paper tubes. Now, they want to explore sex. “If you do sex scenes on stage with humans, it can be embarrassing, maybe even shocking,” Holmstrom explains. “But you can use dolls to look at sex in a different way.”

When they searched for the right story, Jackie Collins came to mind. “She’s very famous in Sweden, and everyone has her books on their grandmothers’ shelves,” Holmstrom says of the Queen of Smut. “Her books surrounded our childhoods,” Erickson agrees. “It was a bit taboo. Adult.”

Collins’ novel captures the sordid charm of the Swinging Sixties, in which one man’s affair leads to a spectacle of sexual experimentation against the backdrop of the predatory culture of the film industry. Olson was surprised by how fresh the story was, with its media sex parties and dodgy casting couches that mirrored stories that emerged from the #MeToo era. “The book was written more than 50 years ago, but it was very current,” Olson says. Meanwhile, dolls seemed well-suited to a narrative obsessed with sex, bodies, and beauty. “Her face seemed to register no expression at all,” Collins wrote of one character. “It was like a beautiful doll but completely empty and painted.”

Their project – making scattered toys – is a strange struggle between the innocent and the sexy. The dolls, made from Barbie dolls, are taken apart and rebuilt, with heads that pop off on interchangeable bodies. Magnets help with eye-mouth coordination. Blocking complex sex scenes with dolls is a trivial feat. “At first it was very frustrating, because they couldn’t do the simplest things, like pick up the phone or open the door,” Erickson says. But over time, the puppets became easier to move. “It got to the point where it was like they were starting to live on their own,” she says. “They came to life.”

We don’t often see this kind of international experimental work in the UK, with no money or risk appetite in large supply. But this commitment from Yarde helps bring work that defies expectations to British stages.

In Sweden, Holmström has led efforts to increase the popularity of adult dolls over the past decade. Married men, who first started developing it in 2021, “definitely contributed to that,” he says. Funding from the state and the city of Malmö “increased slightly from year to year.” He describes their financial situation as “quite secure, but always on a shoestring.” Meanwhile, London Square’s newly doubled size is getting support from the Swedish Arts Council, raising the possibility of hosting more international acts.

Bringing this offering of so many small parts to other cities presented another challenge: packaging. When they took the show to Stockholm, an opening-night scare over a misplaced tongue ensued. “It’s only a few millimeters long, and it’s on a stick,” Olson says of one of the smallest (but most industrious) props in the show.

Fortunately, Malmö Dockteater’s DIY aesthetic can be recreated after rummaging through your junk drawer at home – and that’s intentionally so. “I like it when the public thinks they can go home and make their own products,” Holmstrom says. That night, a new tongue was put together. The show could go on, and another audience would go home rummaging through their grandmothers’ shelves, hoping to find one of Collins’s delightful works to take with them to bed.

The world is full of married men The courtyard london theatre, July 21 To August 1.