Maharajah and the Kohinoor

The sell-out show returns to the Drum. Duleep Singh, the “Black Prince of Perthshire”, was deposed as Maharajah of Lahore at the age of eleven and sent to England, where he was granted Scottish estates by Queen Victoria.

Adopted by high society, becoming Christianised and educated in Scotland, Singh continued to dream of a triumphant return to the Punjab at the head of a Sikh army, forming alliances with Irish revolutionaries and the Russian government to this end.

Yet the last Sikh emperor was eventually left isolated by the machinations of political rivals, dying of an epileptic fit in Paris in 1893 upon realising his second wife was a British government spy. This play tells his story: of thwarted love, political intrigue, and the machinations of the Raj.