Ellen Key must be stopped!

Ellen Key Must Be Stopped! is a wild, beautiful, and poetic performance created and performed by Catti Brandelius and Anneli Jordahl, premiering during the jubilee year 2026, marking 100 years since Ellen Key’s death. It is a showy musical performance about one of Sweden’s most important thinkers.

The production combines newly written dialogue and music and portrays Ellen Key’s life in her home, Strand, by Lake Vättern, where she lived together with her housekeeper and “daughterly friend” Malin Blomsterberg. Through the relationship between Ellen and Malin, Ellen Key’s life story and groundbreaking achievements are brought to the fore: her passionate engagement in democratic movements—which also included children and women—and how this provoked outrage and fierce backlash. It depicts how she gathered women from all social classes at Strand for exchange, discussion, and education; how she was mocked and questioned; and how her work has shaped our society and continues to do so, a hundred years after her death. What drove her?

Tickets available here.

On stage: Catti Brandelius, Anneli Jordahl, and Åsa Johnsen
Script: Catti Brandelius and Anneli Jordahl
Dialogue: Anneli Jordahl
Music: Catti Brandelius, Eric Palmqwist, Juno Brandelius
Direction: Therese Hörnqvist
Set design: Linn Delin, Atelier Delin
Sound & Lighting: Simon Ahlgren, NANANA
Graphic design: Lotta Kühlhorn
Photography: Åse Bengtsson Helin
Producer: Elin Trogen, La Firme Catti Brandelius

Catti Brandelius is an artist and musician, known for her alter ego Miss Universum. She has previously written a song about Ellen Key and drawn on Key’s ideas in the performance Profesora (2005).
www.cattibrandelius.se

Anneli Jordahl is an author. She wrote the novel I Would Be Your Dog (If Only I Might Be in Your Presence), a fictional portrayal of selected episodes from Ellen Key’s life, including her love story with Urban von Feilitzen. Parts of the script are based on the book.

Ellen Key (1849–1926) was one of the most influential—but also one of the most controversial—Swedish thinkers and writers of her time. Her ideas about love, marriage, and sexuality challenged the prevailing norms at the turn of the 20th century. She published some 30 works during her lifetime, and her radical and at times highly problematic ideas continue to be debated. The Century of the Child made Ellen Key world-famous; the book advocated a ban on corporal punishment, the abolition of school grades, and argued that there are no illegitimate children.

Practical information:
The performance is approximately 1 hour long, without intermission.
Seating is unnumbered.
No age limit. Younger children and infants should wear hearing protection.
Accessibility:
There is no designated wheelchair seating area in the audience, but the seating arrangement can be adapted.

Ellen Key has to be stopped is a guest production in collaboration with Tensta konsthall, with support from Konstnärsnämnden and Längmanska Kulturfonden.