Darling Dido

New Cellars, Pembroke College

Loosely based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, set a few years after the First World War, Darling Dido is the coming-of-age story of Dido, who is a sixteen-year-old mixed-race girl living in 1920s England.

She is the result of an affair between her now retired naval officer father and a woman from the British West Indies. Raised in an upper middle class English family, disciplined, and educated into the image of white refinement, Dido is caught between a desire to conform to white upper-class civility or find her place within the shifting social tides of post-war Britain. But overall, she yearns most deeply for the one thing she believes will secure her place in the world: love, marriage, and motherhood. What becomes of a girl who mistakes love for salvation?

An Intimate, disturbing, and emotionally raw historical fiction, the play explores racial relations, love, and the dangerous longing to belong, challenging myths of romance and respectability.