A Visit to London- Two plays — “The Taming of the Shrew” and “A History of Water in the Middle East” along with the Lord Mayor of London’s Parade on Saturday and Remembrance Day on Sunday.

Everywhere you turn in this town — history stares right back at you.

Taming of the Shrew — Royal Shakespeare Company Barbican Theatre London

I can imagine a member of the breathtakingly talented cast of the Royal Shakespeare Company stepping forward just before the play starts to look down at the ghost of the Bard sitting in the front row and saying to him, “Welcome to 2019 sir. We made a few changes but don’t worry your play is in excellent hands” To which he would, of course, respond, “Tru dat”.

The original play about the “taming” of a strong willed woman and a father’s commodification of his daughter and her dowry in Elizabethan England has been deservedly turned upside down and inside out. Getting right to the point — Kate is a guy and her mother is doing the negotiating with a female suitor.

As was so aptly put in a posting by Theatr Clwd, a Wales regional nonprofit theatre — 1590’s England has been reimagined as a matriarchy.

The casting has broken some other ceilings. There is an actor zooming around in a wheelchair.

and a deaf actor signing Shakespeare

It was delightfully performed with full bodied, physically comedic, performances by the veteran pros of the Royal Shakespeare Company, enhanced by exquisite costumes meticulously crafted to drive the narrative.

A HISTORY OF WATER IN THE MIDDLE EAST — by Sabina Mahfouz — Royal Court Theatre

Sabrina Mahfouz, the playwright and lead performer, has artfully constructed a complex, factually dense, drama that weaves in the story of her life as a Brit of Egyptian descent looking at the colonial history of middle east geopolitics from post WWI to the present interspersed with the story of the aggressive vetting of her own failed application to be a British spy.

Ms. Mahfouz met the challenge of telling this complex personal story with the help of songs and dance beautifully delivered with Laura Hanna, also a child of parents of the “ex-British colonies”, blended with dancing and a series of Hamiltonesq raps.

The play is a tightly written provocative journey through the ancient and present day history of water of the Nile as the metaphoric and actual driving force behind the history and mythology of the region.

A much appreciated copy of the script, available in the lobby, includes this from Ms. Mahfouz’s narrative;

It has run through all of what we know, our knowledge stream is literally tributaries from the Nile — philosophies, astronomies, mathematics from Kismet, water wheels, iron works, furnaces from the empire of Kush. . .

and “ somewhere along the line from Oxford to Harvard white scholars did their best to carve out the African origins of knowledge.