Anatomically correct Barbies, Swedish puppetry, and the erotics of audience complicity

On a stage at Malmö Dockteater, a woman stands in a strap-on harness. Her partner is plastic, the size of an adult man, with the exaggerated facial features of a fashion doll. Their scene is performed in front of a paying audience. The puppet, the company insists, makes the impossible possible.

Malmö Dockteater is staging an adaptation of Jackie Collins’s 1968 debut novel The World Is Full of Married Men, and the production’s central provocation is structural: when the bodies on stage are not human, what counts as exposure, and what counts as consent? The director Erik Holmström, quoted in The Guardian’s report on the production, said the show is built around the idea that the audience becomes complicit in arousal. That framing is doing real work. It turns a stylistic choice (anatomically explicit dolls) into a philosophical claim about spectatorship.

The play treats the 1960s Los Angeles of Collins’s novel as a laboratory for a question that has not gone away: how do you put sex on a public stage without either sanitising it or hardening it into pornography? The puppet, the production argues, gives the theatre a third register, somewhere between the clothed actor and the unclothed performer. The Guardian notes that the company is leaning into the shock of the device: the dolls are recognisably Barbies, the toy most associated in the public mind with anodyne, sanitised femininity, and they have been remade with explicit genitalia and prominent nipples. The collision of registers is the point.

What the production actually claims

The Guardian piece, published 17 July 2026, makes the case for puppetry as a kind of permission slip. Holmström is quoted saying that puppets allow performers to "explore sex in a different way," because the figure on stage is, in a strict sense, an object. The audience is being asked to suspend one set of moral reflexes and activate another. When a doll with detachable parts is penetrated on stage, the visible fact of artifice, that it is plastic and not flesh, is supposed to do the work that nudity on a human body cannot do: signal that the encounter is staged, that the violence and the desire are both representations.

This is a contested claim, and the production knows it. The doll-as-permission argument has a long lineage in European puppet theatre, from the bawdy Pulcinella shows of eighteenth-century Naples to the adult-oriented object theatre of companies like Blind Summit. The novel itself, a Hollywood roman à clef about a publicity executive and the sexual free-for-all he enables, was scandalous on its 1968 publication and remains a touchstone for discussions of female sexual agency in popular fiction. Collins sold more than 500 million books in her career; her debut is still the easiest of her works to dismiss and the hardest to ignore.

A counter-argument the company has to answer

The most obvious objection is that the puppet does not, in fact, neutralise the gaze. It changes what is looked at but not the act of looking. A plastic doll with exaggerated breasts, handled by a human performer under stage lighting, is still an image of a woman constructed for consumption; the barbie framing only makes that construction more legible. The production’s claim to be defusing the male gaze by externalising it onto a doll can be read, with equal textual support, as a more candid version of the same gaze, one that has stopped pretending to be about a real woman.

There is also a Swedish context. Sweden abolished its censorship board for stage performance in 1970, and the country’s publicly funded theatres have, since then, treated the question of what can be shown as an artistic rather than a regulatory one. Productions at institutionally supported houses such as Malmö Dockteater, which receives municipal and regional funding, are not constrained by the kinds of obscenity prosecutions that occasionally still surface in the United Kingdom or the United States. That institutional latitude is part of why the show can exist at all. It is also why the comparison that matters is not to British theatre but to other Swedish experiments in putting explicit content on subsidised stages, where the audience is by definition not a captive one.

Why the doll works as a figure

The choice of the Barbie form, rather than a generic mannequin or a more neutral puppet body, is doing specific cultural work. The Barbie is, in the public imagination, the most aggressively asexualised figure that is also, paradoxically, presented to children. To take that figure and add the genitalia that the original toy has always conspicuously lacked is to force the audience to confront what was already latent in the object. The production is not adding sex to an innocent toy. It is making explicit a sexuality that the toy's design has long implied.

This puts the show in a different conversation than straightforward puppet-as-censorship-evasion. The more interesting argument, the one the Guardian piece gestures at, is that the doll is a figure for the performative construction of femininity itself. If the audience becomes "horny," as Holmström puts it, the arousal is not to a woman but to a stereotype of one, and that recognition is supposed to fold back on the viewer. Whether the production actually achieves that folding, rather than simply inviting the arousal to land uncritically, is the question that will determine whether the show reads as critique or as provocation for its own sake.

What is at stake for the form

For European puppet theatre, which has spent two decades working out whether the form is adult medium or family entertainment, the production is a small data point in a larger argument. The most successful recent adult puppet work, from War Horse at the National Theatre to the international touring of Life of Pi, has used the form to access emotional registers that human-scale performance finds harder to reach: the patience of an animal, the strangeness of a child’s perspective, the unblinking fact of a body that does not register pain the way ours do. Sex is the obvious next frontier, and it is also the one most likely to expose the limits of the form. A puppet cannot flinch; it cannot refuse; it cannot, in the moment of the scene, change its mind. Those limits are part of what makes the device interesting, and part of what makes it dangerous.

For Collins’s reputation, the production matters less. Her novels have been adapted for screen before, and her commercial scale has long insulated her from the literary establishment’s indifference. What the Malmö production adds is a specific, dated argument: that the 1960s sexual revolution Collins documented was, among other things, a revolution in who was allowed to be looked at, and that the barbie figure, with its air of innocence, is exactly the right image for revisiting that argument now.

The production runs at Malmö Dockteater. The Guardian’s report is dated 17 July 2026, and the piece does not specify the run’s closing date. What the sources do not say is whether the production will tour beyond Malmö, whether it has provoked any formal complaint to the venue’s funders, or how the company is handling the question of whether minors are admitted. Those are the gaps a reader will want to watch. The show is making a claim about audience complicity; the next question is what that audience does with it.

Desk note: Monexus is covering this production as a story about the form, not as a moral referendum on its content. The Guardian’s reporting is the primary source; we have not independently confirmed attendance policies, tour dates, or funding responses.