How to stage Jackie Collins? With dolls
The first ever theatre adaptation of a Collins bestseller takes a surprising approach.
The World Is Full of Married Men was Jackie Collins’ debut novel. Published in 1968, it set the tone for what would follow. The book details the extramarital exploits of middle-aged advertising exec David Cooper, who cheats on his wife Linda with a young woman, only to regret his actions when Linda hooks up with a Hollywood producer. It’s sexually frank from the first page. The novel opens with a post-coital conversation between David and his much younger lover Claudia.
Collins started to write after an abortive attempt at an acting career. Despite – or, more likely, because of its content – the book became a bestseller. It was banned in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa but this didn’t exactly harm its sales in the United Kingdom and the US. Barbara Cartland called it “nasty, filthy and disgusting”.
Unlikely as it may sound, Collins’ novel is the inspiration for a show coming to east London’s newly reopened Yard Theatre this month, a co-production between Malmö Dockteater – a Swedish theatre company that has pioneered its own brand of puppet theatre for adults — and Malmö Stadsteater, with a new translation of the text by acclaimed playwright Lulu Raczka. The company uses puppets, toys and other objects to tell the most unlikely stories on stage. The World Is Full of Married Men, which premiered in Malmö in 2021, is told using dolls – yes, that’s right, dolls – on a series of miniature sets replicating the novel’s glamorous locations, including the hotel rooms in which David’s liaisons take place. Audiences get to witness Barbies getting down to it and hitting the disco.
Malmö Dockteater – which just means Malmö puppet theatre — was founded by Erik Holmström, who remains the creative driving force behind many of its projects, including this one. Over the years he has explored and expanded the idea of what puppet theatre can be and the stories it can tackle. The company’s current repertoire also includes an adaptation of the Swedish cult novel The Hunters at Karinhall, about one of Hermann Göring’s extravagant hunting trips.
‘Racy’ material of the type Collins specialised in presents its own challenges – on-stage sex scenes are rarely, if ever, sexy
Holmström’s production allows the audience to see the puppeteers manipulating the dolls’ plastic limbs and occasionally entering the performance themselves by way of green screen. He’s clearly interested in the potential of dolls to tell stories about sex and desire. Maybe there’s also a nod to Jacqueline Susann’s monster 1966 hit Valley of the Dolls, with which Collins’ novel shares some DNA.
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Holmström isn’t the first to use dolls to tell decidedly adult stories. US filmmaker Todd Haynes launched his career with the 1987 movie Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which told the story of the US musician using Barbie dolls. Richard Carpenter promptly sued and blocked the film’s theatrical release, turning it into a bootleg favourite.
However, while eight of Collins’ novels have been adapted for the screen, either as films – including The Stud, starring sister Joan and a version of The World Is Full of Married Men that relocated the action to the 1970s – or for TV, I believe this is the only stage adaptation of one of her books to date. While commercial fiction regularly gets adapted for the screen, it’s far less common to see this kind of work adapted for the stage. There are exceptions of course — a stage adaptation of SJ Watson’s bestseller Before I Go to Sleep by Rachel Wagstaff will tour theatres next year – but, on the whole, we prefer our literary adaptations to be, well, literary.
Partly this is practical. Thrillers designed to keep the reader turning pages are notoriously hard to adapt for the stage. They can feel incredibly bitty. ‘Racy’ material of the type Collins specialised in presents its own challenges – on-stage sex scenes are rarely, if ever, sexy. But I think, in the UK at least, there’s also a conservatism of approach at play coupled with a relatively narrow view of what is ‘suitable’ for stage adaptation. As well as being an early example of what we used to call the ‘bonkbuster’, Collins’ novel is very much a product of its time, and that’s what makes it fascinating. A Swedish critic described the performance as “an anthropological study brought to life”. A willingness to experiment both with what gets adapted, and how it gets adapted, has resulted in what looks like one of the most distinctive shows you’re likely to see in London this summer.
The World Is Full of Married Men is at the Yard Theatre, London, from 21st July to 1st August
