Sabrina Mahfouz in ‘A History of Water in the Middle East’. Photo: Craig Sugden

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Sabrina Mahfouz’s new play sounds, from the title, like a dusty tome on a bookshelf. But she’s worked not to make it dry. It’s got big ideas coursing through it – Mahfouz’s lecture-style narrative tells the story of how colonialism that carved a path through the Middle East, dividing nations along lines that would cause centuries of conflict. And she makes a case for water, not oil or blood, being the liquid that powers the region’s fiercest-fought battles.

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It’s kind of refreshing when the beat kicks in. Mahfouz’s breakout hit was With A Little Bit of Luck, a rave shaggy dog story about a young woman dealing pills and dancing till the sweat poured off her at 00s London’s secret parties. This time round she’s got musician Kareem Samara on board to soundtrack things with traditional Egyptian drums, delicately resonant, along with gut-stirring singing by Laura Hanna; they try out some rave hybrid songs that sometimes soar, and sometimes career out of control (I checked the playtext and still don’t understand the one that assigned Middle Eastern countries different number of legs, like they were rare and mysterious insects).

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This is a play that oscillates between styles. As well as lecture sections and sung sections there are bits where Mahfouz reenacts an interview she had with a recruiter for the British spying service (the playtext says we’re dealing in fiction but she spoke about the experience in a Guardian interview here). Their carefully drawn scenes together are fascinating, a lesson in the gap between what British officialdom says and what it means, in the insidious racism built into innocuous questions. He wears away at her resistance, trying to provoke or squeeze even a drop of political anger out of her.

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I went to History of Water after reading Victoria Sadler’s post on gender nonparity for female playwrights in London’s biggest theatres. It’s the kind of thing that you read and go ‘huh that’s depressing’ but discount the emotional impact that’s soaked into you until later – that sense of wanting a narrative of hope and progress and being met with something dull and grey. Royal Court topped the list, and deservedly so; this whole season is remarkable for the way it’s filled both stages, studio and main, with work by female artists, and especially female artists of colour.

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With all this in mind, and knowing there’s a real thing where female artists get trapped in studios making semi-autobiographical work, I still end up feeling that History of Water is at its most powerful when it’s drawing on Mahfouz’s own experiences. The Middle East is a region that’s too big, too disparate to be contained and explained in an hour – the lecture portions of the show skip hectically between location and eras, to female plumbers in 2040 Jordan to refugees in Lebanon and back to strategic battles over the Suez Canal. There’s not time to get invested in each bit of the narrative, and get a bodily sense of why water is as central as we’re continually told it is. This is a work that looks and sounds a lot like any number of documentary theatre-style devised fringe shows, but it’s all scripted by Mahfouz. And perhaps that’s why her interactions with Samara and Hanna feel a little too stagey to hold this material together, lacking the urgency and naturalness that you’d get if these three artists had thrashed out how to tell the story together. I get that it’s important to compile numbers on gender and playwrights, but when we do that, are we excluding other ways of making theatre from the story; reaffirming ‘writer’s theatre’ over more collaborative ways of working?

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It’s drizzling a little outside as I write this, and my window’s doubly soaked. Rain outside, condensation inside. Somehow I always seem to live in basement rooms, humid as caves. I struggle to imagine what it’s like to be in a perpetual state of drought. My girlfriend jokes that she moved to the UK because whatever else climate change brings, at least we won’t run out of water.

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I only feel the impact of History of Water once I’m a few hours out of the theatre, and have had time to put everything together. It’s a reminder of all the world news stories I pass on reading, an hour-long crash course on issues you could write ten-volume book series on. This show doesn’t quite flow, but there’s still something powerful about following a trail of water through all these huge narratives of colonialism, migration, and climate change.

A History of Water in the Middle East is on at Royal Court Theatre until 16th November 2019. More info and tickets here.