A History of Water in the Middle East sounds like the title of a lecture, and that’s its conceit – and kind of what it is, albeit in an inevitably more theatrical form Upstairs at the Royal Court. It has an unlikely origin: Writer/performer Sabrina Mahfouz has dual British/Egyptian nationality which, when she graduated from university, made her of interest to MI5 recruiters. She applied to become a British spy, but found that the vetting process seemed to be ruling her out largely because of the same background that had made her a candidate in the first place. One of the sticking points was her thesis about water in the Middle East, and the many ways over the last two centuries that it’s been both used as an instrument of colonisation and weaponised in the conflicts that followed. Together with Laura Hanna, who has a similar ethnic background to Mahfouz and does the heavy lifting where the singing’s concerned, she gives us a potted history of the region through story and song.
