DORINDA HULTON

Dorinda attended Manor House School in Dorset, England, as a boarder from the age of 8, and Wentworth School in Bournemouth until the age of 17. Her mother and father lived in Pakistan and India during this time. In 1969 she qualified as a teacher with Distinction from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She went from there to complete a postgraduate course in Theatre Direction at Bristol University.

She taught Drama at Exeter University for forty-two years until 2011 and is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow. Her research has been embedded within her professional theatre work inside the SW region of England, in the West Midlands, and, since 2003, in Cyprus and various cities in Europe to which her work has toured.

Dorinda Margaret Lao Hulton (nee Stewart) was born on 29th September 1946 at Dufferin Hospital, Rangoon, Burma. Her mother, Elizabeth Stewart, was Burmese. Elizabeth’s Burmese name was Ma Saw Tin, and she came from a third-generation Christian family. She was the daughter of Dr Ah Pon, a Baptist Minister and surgeon trained in western medicine. Elizabeth was awarded a BA from Rangoon University in 1930, and an MA from Columbia University, New York, in 1932. As Burma was part of the British Empire at the time, she had a British passport.

Dorinda’s father, Vincent Stewart, was Jamaican of Irish descent. His great grandfather emigrated to Jamaica, from Ireland, in about 1832. Dorinda’s mother and father were married in 1943 in Madras, India. Her brother Massy was born in 1945, in India.

Elizabeth’s daughter from a first marriage, Veronica (Vreni) was born in 1937 in Burma, and she became a member of the Stewart family after the Japanese occupation. In 1947, with independence imminent in Burma, Vincent no longer had work there and he returned to Jamaica to introduce his family to his mother and mark his father’s grave. In 1948, a British oil business the Burma Oil Company offered Vincent work in India and so, he and his family took the Empire Windrush from Jamaica to Tilbury.

They left London on the SS Cecelia four days later and disembarked in Karachi, in the newly independent Pakistan. Eleven practice-as-research inter-arts performances have arisen out of Hulton’s collaboration as director and dramaturg, with Cypriot artists from either side of the military border.

She is married to Peter Richard Hulton and they are blessed with one daughter and her family.

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