Erik Holmström holds up a naked, headless Ken doll. Most of the figure is as you’d expect: lean muscles, smooth skin. But lower down, something’s different. Between those hairless thighs is a small plastic penis nestled in a tuft of hair. “It’s real hair,” says Holmström, the director of Malmö Dockteater (that’s “puppet theatre” in Swedish). Performer and puppeteer Kajsa Ericsson jumps in. “Not real pubic hair,” she clarifies.
This doll is not just a prop of the company’s new show; it’s one of the stars. Malmö Dockteater has adapted Jackie Collins’s debut novel, The World Is Full of Married Men, into an experimental puppet production that leaps fearlessly into the explicit sex scenes that got the novel banned in several countries when it was first published in 1968. After performances in Malmö and Stockholm, the company is bringing the show to the newly refurbished Yard theatre in east London, where it will be performed in Swedish with English subtitles.
Miniature World of Raunchy Glamour
Collins’s raunchy world is rendered in miniature: the intricate set features 14 dollhouses, with the two puppeteers (who are also performers in the show and act as lifesize versions of their respective dolls) conjuring the action of the houses’ bed-hopping occupants with reconstructed Barbie dolls. “I had this dream of making a show where an audience sits together and secretly becomes a bit horny,” says Holmström. “You don’t expect it from a puppet theatre.” He picks up a headless Barbie with a full bush and a tiny hole drilled in her crotch. Collins was famously graphic in her romance novels and they didn’t want to let her down on stage. “If Jackie is telling us to do that,” shrugs Holmström, “we do that.”
Open-Plan Puppeteering
Merging theatre, film and sexually active puppets, nothing in this production is hidden from the viewer. We can see the two actors (Ericsson and Erik Olsson) puppeteer the dolls. They’re joined by videographer Josefin Beischer, whose camera captures the miniature action up close and is livestreamed on to a large screen. The setup allows the audience to see it all: the humans, the dolls, as well as the physical act of puppeteering. “That’s one of the reasons I started our puppet theatre,” says Holmström of the show’s open-plan arrangement. “I was so interested in the mechanics.” He likes to show the hand that pulls the string or holds a prop. “You can see the glue, the screws,” he says. “We work with openness, with making things visible.”
Adult Puppetry in Sweden
Puppet shows are often associated with family theatre; Malmö Dockteater wants to broaden their appeal. The company began in a basement workshop in Malmö in 2015 and remains the only puppet theatre for adults in Sweden. Over the last decade they’ve created hi-tech, low-budget shows across genres, from an existentialist production featuring robots and enormous dinosaur heads to a homage to Dante’s Inferno with scrappy puppets made from toilet paper tubes. Now, they want to explore sex. “If you do sex scenes on stage with humans, it’s maybe embarrassing, maybe shocking,” Holmström explains. “But you can use puppets 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 everybody has her books on their grandmothers’ shelves,” Holmström says about the queen of smut. “Her books surrounded our childhoods,” agrees Ericsson. “It was something a bit forbidden. Adult.”
Relevance in the #MeToo Era
Collins’s novel captures the sordid glamour of the swinging 60s, as one man’s affair kicks off a kaleidoscope of sexual experiences against the backdrop of the predatory culture of the film industry. Olsson was surprised by how modern the story felt, with its media sex parties and dodgy casting couches reflecting the stories that emerged from the #MeToo era. “It was written more than 50 years ago,” says Olsson, “but it was so up to date.” Dolls, meanwhile, seemed perfectly suited to a novel obsessed with sex, bodies and beauty. “Her face never seemed to register any expression,” Collins wrote of one character. “It was like that of a beautiful, but quite blank, painted doll.”
Challenges of Puppet Sex Scenes
Their project – making toys shag – is a curious clash of the innocent and erotic. The puppets, built from Barbies, are pulled apart and rebuilt, with heads that pop on to interchangeable bodies. Magnets help coordinate eyes and mouths. Blocking intricate sex scenes with dolls is a fiddly business. “In the beginning it was really frustrating,” says Ericsson, “because they couldn’t do the simplest things, like pick up a phone or open a door.” But over time, the dolls gained an ease of movement. “It came to the point where it was almost like they started to live by themselves,” she says. “They came to life.”
Bringing Experimental Work to London
We don’t often see this kind of experimental, international work in the UK, with neither funds nor appetite for risk in significant supply. But this commitment from the Yard helps bring work that challenges expectations to British stages. In Sweden, Holmström’s company has led the charge in increasing adult puppetry’s popularity over the last decade. Married Men, which they first began developing in 2021, “has definitely contributed to that”, he says. Funding from the state and Malmö city has “increased a bit from year to year”. He describes their financial position as “quite safe, but always with a small budget”. Meanwhile, London’s newly doubled-in-size Yard is also getting support from the Swedish Arts Council, heightening the potential of hosting more international work.
Bringing this show of many mini-parts to other cities posed one more challenge: packing. When they took the show to Stockholm, a panic ensued on opening night over a misplaced tongue. “It’s just a few millimetres, and it’s on a stick,” Olsson says of one of the smallest (but hardest-working) props in the show. Luckily, Malmö Dockteater’s DIY aesthetic could be recreated after a rummage around the junk drawer at home – and deliberately so. “I like when the audience think they could go home and make their own,” says Holmström. That night, a fresh tongue was cobbled together. The show could go on, and another audience went home to rifle through their grandmothers’ shelves, hoping to find another of Collins’s bonkbusters to take with them to bed.
