This is a big one for me...
My English translation of Carla Zúñiga’s The SAD Summers of Princess Diana has been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama as part of Latin American Plays in Translation: Modern Stories of Gender, Class and Society in Latin America.
The book was also launched through a HowlRound online symposium produced with Methuen Drama and moderated by Sophie Stevens. I joined other contributors to the anthology, including Xavier Villanova, William Gregory and Zhui Ning Chang, for a conversation about theatre across borders, translation, and why these Latin American plays matter now.
I first started translating this play during my MFA in Theatre Directing at East 15, and somehow it has stayed with me ever since. It has followed me through workshops, rehearsed readings, conversations with actors, endless drafts, funding applications, rejections, rethinks, motherhood, life in London, and a long ongoing relationship with Carla’s writing.
Carla Zúñiga’s theatre is exactly the kind of work I feel pulled towards. It is funny, brutal, excessive, tender, political, ridiculous and devastating. It does not behave politely. It moves between tragedy and comedy without asking for permission, and it speaks about violence, shame, desire, fantasy and survival in a way that feels completely alive.
The SAD Summers of Princess Diana is a grotesque feminist satire about what happens when womanhood becomes a spectacle. It uses the figure of the princess to open up a much wider, darker and more ridiculous world, one where women are watched, judged, desired, punished, pitied, adored and destroyed, often all at the same time.
The play is full of princesses, maids, princes, journalists, ghosts, children, shame, vomit, glitter, bad taste, violence and impossible tenderness. It is very funny. It is very painful. It is completely theatrical. It plays like a brutal, camp anti-fairy tale, but one where nobody arrives to save you and the fantasy itself is part of the violence.
For me, translating this play has never been separate from imagining how it might live in performance. I have always heard it as something fast, visual, sharp and emotionally dangerous. A play that needs rhythm, excess, beauty, ugliness, humour and nerve. A play that asks for a whole world on stage.
I also want to acknowledge the people and spaces that helped me get the translation to this point. First of all, my husband, Vincent Nadeau, who has been incredibly supportive throughout the whole process. He read the play with me a hundred of times, helped me edit, question choices, listen to rhythm and keep going when the process felt endless. .
A huge thank you also to Bold Elephant, who generously provided space for a final reading of the translation before it went to press. Having that last chance to hear the play in a room, with people, bodies and voices, was incredibly important before sending it into the world.
I’m also very grateful to dear colleagues and friends who read, commented, questioned and fed back on the translation before the final draft went to print: Gabriel Díaz, Constanza Ruff, Larisa Muñoz, Sanyen Sánchez, Shivone Domínguez, Ximena Larraguibel, Mimmi Bauer, Marisol Spensieri, Jimena Larraguivel and Samantha Manzur. Their generosity and attention helped me feel that the play had been properly listened to before it entered the world in English.
Having the translation published feels like a huge step, but it also feels like the beginning of the next one. I am now developing the first UK staging of the play and thinking about how this work can meet audiences here, including Latin American, migrant, feminist, queer, trans, bilingual and wider UK audiences who might recognise something of themselves in its violence, humour, longing and absurdity.
The next stage is an R&D process exploring the play’s visual world, tone, rhythm, translation, cultural resonance and performance language. I am interested in how its humour travels, how its politics are held, how its more uncomfortable questions land in the UK now, and how its excessive theatricality can be staged with care, boldness and imagination.
This publication is a beautiful marker of how far the play has travelled. Now I want to keep moving it towards the room, the stage, the audience, and the messy, exciting life of performance.
