Shark Week? Not the Discovery Channel’s annual event. It’s urban argot for the week a woman has her period. The publicity for Waiting for Shark Week pitches it thus: “Vagimir and Estrogen are stuck in the Patriarchy waiting for the arrival of Equality.” (Since that was written I think ‘equity’ has become the preferred term.)

Setting the stage, Maggie Leigh White riffs rudely on Samuel Beckett’s Act 1 stage directions. Estragon’s boot problem is replaced by the struggle Pippa Drakeford’s Estrogen is having with her Moon Cup. Stevie Hancox-Monk’s Vagimir ponders Estrogen’s “Nothing to be done” and concludes not everything has been tried so the struggle must be resumed.  

How I would love to see this potently pertinent parody played out in full – by this ideal cast! But this sketch show’s fourth performer, Canadian Sarah Bergbusch, delivers a classic complaint that it lacks nuanced existentialism. And throughout the hour-long show – counterpointing more excellent snippets from Waiting for Shark Week – we are treated to readings of actual letters from the Beckett Estate refusing various applications to produce Waiting for Godot with women playing Vladimir and Estragon, citing laughable reasons. It’s not out of copyright until 2039 so wait we must … or must we?

They don’t mention that 45 years ago a Wellington production slipped under the radar in what may well have been a world first. Just over the road from BATS, at what was then Downstage Theatre, the Come Together Festival ’75 included a late-night Jean Betts-directed Waiting for Godot with an all-woman cast: Domini Searell (Estragon), Alannah O’Sullivan (Vladimir), Susan Wilson (Pozzo), April Kelland (Lucky) and Yvonne McKay (a Girl).

Be they witches or astronauts, peasants or queens, women have bled forever but attempts to discover how menstruation was managed through time fall foul of recorded HIStory’s burying HERstory. An acrostic poem sums up P A T R I A R C H Y and a series of eviscerating audition vignettes reveal what it’s like to be a woman in theatre.

A wacky game show called ‘What’s in the Womb?’ is revealing. Stevie Hancox-Monk transforms remarkably to bring us old Walter and his plaintive song of paranoia, asserting that no-one knows what it’s like to be a white man, straight and a Boomer.  

The arts-funding gate-keepers are characterised as posh women using a flow chart to determine whether The Feminist Theatre Troupe’s application should be granted. Hancox-Monk (who played a memorable Hamlet last year) auditions for Prince Hal and precipitates rampant banter about feminist takes on Shakespeare – largely lifted from online reactions to last year’s widespread outrage at the Pop-up Globe’s use of the #MeToo and #Timesup movements to promote an all-male production of The Taming of the Shrew.

Character notes for female roles – including Jane, Rebecca, Mrs Mason, in something: should we recognise it? – are squirm-inducing. A Bechdel Test game applied to popular movies produces very surprising results. No wonder Maggie Leigh White is moved to declare she “will not be reduced to a socially acceptable fetish.”

Her prone Pozzo-esque plea for help, and Vagimir and Estrogen’s inability to realise their own capacity for self-actualisation, determination and agency, leave us with plenty to ponder as the closing song lifts our spirits and brings the show to an end.  

Waiting for Shark Week is potently pertinent satire for which you should not wait to book. 

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