The SAD Summers of Princess Diana was my first full play translation, and the beginning of my long relationship with Carla Zúñiga’s work.

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I started translating it in 2018, during my MFA in Theatre Directing at East 15. At the time, I was looking for Latin American plays that could speak to UK audiences without becoming polite, softened or overexplained. Then I found Carla’s writing: brutal, funny, grotesque, feminist, excessive and completely alive.

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The play begins like a fairy tale after the spell has gone wrong. A princess wakes up in a tower, covered in vomit, drugged and confused. She is being held prisoner by her two maids for something terrible that happened the night before, although she cannot remember what. With the help of her two children, she tries to escape before something worse happens.

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What unfolds is a dark, camp and macabre anti-fairy tale about gender-based violence, pop culture, motherhood, trans lives, class, fantasy and the impossible roles women are asked to perform. Princess Diana and Anne Boleyn appear here through a Latin American feminist lens: icons of femininity, tragedy and public consumption, reimagined inside Carla’s grotesque theatrical world.

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Translating the play meant learning how to carry its rhythm, cruelty and humour into English. Carla’s writing moves very quickly between the ridiculous and the devastating. One moment feels like a satire. The next one cuts very deep, and feels more like a tragedy. I wanted the English version to keep that instability, and to allow UK audiences to feel the shock of a fairy tale turning into something much darker, stranger and more recognisable.

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The translation has been developed through workshops and readings with UK-based artists, including Global Latin American Voices at the Roundhouse, Presence Theatre’s live reading group and Out of the Wings. In 2025, it was published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama as part of Latin American Plays in Translation, an anthology of contemporary Latin American plays newly translated for English-language audiences.

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This translation opened the door to my wider work with Carla’s plays. It also shaped the way I now think about translation: as a rehearsal-room process, a political act, and a way of bringing Latin American feminist theatre into dialogue with UK stages.