Essay: procrastination, perfectionism and Jojo Zhou’s Porpoise Pool
Written by Jojo Zhou, directed by Eve Beck
Essay by Charlotte Smee
It is a truth universally acknowledged that most theatre reviews should be written and published within two days of seeing the production being reviewed, or at least during the time that the production is still being performed. It is a truth less universally acknowledged that deadlines, when self-imposed, become less and less threatening the longer they fall behind.
Publishing theatre reviews in a “timely” fashion makes sense for a few reasons, depending on how you view the review and the purpose it is being written for. Most of those reasons are that reviews, in theatre world theory, are primarily a marketing tool: a good review means more audience members, tickets, and money in scarily underfunded Australian theatres. They are therefore only useful if they are published during the time that people can buy more tickets for them. I don’t want to dismiss this kind of review, it has its place, but what if this isn’t always the case? What if theatre reviews are something different too?
Alison Croggon, for example, has a whole collection of theatre criticism still accessible on her website, Theatre Notes. The most recent of these is from 2012. My favourite is from 2004. She also has a collection of criticism (published in real, hard copy) called Remembered Presences, spanning from 2004 - 2012, described “at its centre [as] an eyewitness account of the… Australian theatre renaissance, written as it occurred”. More than just a record of Alison’s development as a critic, it’s a kind of vault of her memories of plays and performances that weren’t (and couldn’t have been) seen by everyone. They might be idiosyncratic, but they’re also a look at the state of theatre as it was then, a point of comparison, and a kind of learning manual for future writers/theatremakers/theatregoers. Croggon is just one example of the kind of critic who wants to capture what it was like to watch something, but also how it felt to fit that something into the wider world.
I’ve procrastinated on this particular review so much that I can only really be writing as an archivist. This is a big call on my part, because I’m no Alison Croggon, but at the same time I don’t think enough theatre reviews do something more than straight up-and-down star awarding (which is why I’m excited for more of this Substack by Guy Webster). Thinking about the act of reviewing in a different way, outside of its timeliness, means that I have to grapple with its usefulness as well as how my memory might inform and misinform … whatever this piece of writing is becoming. What if a theatre review was reaching into the depths of your brain for a fuzzy memory of a play?
Another reason for the quick turnaround required of theatre reviews is that a theatrical performance, usually, is a one-time thing. You see one show, on one night, and rely on your memory of that show to produce a short piece of writing that evaluates that particular performance. People do this in a number of ways: I’ve seen other critics with notebooks in the audience, I often write notes in a Google doc on my phone on the bus home from a show, still others wake up at 5 am the next day to get the review as fresh as possible (and then make it to their full-time job on time, because theatre critics in Australia are rarely, if ever, full-time writers). Memory is a fickle thing. I’m of the strong belief that if something is worth remembering in a production – I will remember it. I try to pay as much attention as I can without taking notes because I think that going to the theatre is best experienced with your whole body, but also because even critics are allowed to have fun in an audience.
With all of this in mind, let’s talk about my most recent failure to meet a timely deadline. I saw Jojo Zhou’s Porpoise Pool, directed by Eve Beck, on 7 June 2023. In the shower, the morning after seeing Porpoise Pool, I ran through everything that had happened and tried to figure out how I’d even begin to put it on the page. Then, I avoided the question for a number of weeks while the rest of my life took over.
As I’m writing an iteration of this essay, it is 3 July 2023. It’ll be another week or so before I send it to a friend and ask them if I should just go back to finishing the half-draft I’d written immediately after I saw the play (Hello, I am the friend and it's been 2 weeks). Part of the reason why I struggled so much with this review is that I couldn’t decide whether I “liked” Porpoise Pool or not (whatever that means) or if it wasn’t right for me to dismiss it when I’d carried it with me for so long. Another part of the reason is that I am very good at talking myself out of things that are too hard.
Porpoise Pool, at its simplest, is about motherhood. Or, more accurately, one person’s experience of being a mother. Lou (Meg Clarke) lives in an ocean-blue apartment (designed by Soham Apte) that is also home to a few ocean-themed toys, a seaweed green couch and a strange white air-con-controller-looking thing sitting on the wall near the door. Lou doesn’t know how to be a mother. She had her son as a teenager, and she’s recently lost her job as a traffic controller (which might not be entirely accurate, but this is my memory of her job).
Lou’s young son Mason doesn’t live in her apartment. He lives with her ex-partner, Jonah (Luke Leong-Tay), and Jonah’s mother Helen (Loretta Kung). Helen is the kind of mother who tells Lou that Jonah is too busy for a girlfriend. Lou’s own mother is notably absent in the play and in the rest of her life. The white air con is later revealed to be “House” (Jane Mahady), an AI system that takes care of Lou, in more ways than just reminding her when to text someone back. Lou’s only other friend is her rough-as-guts yet caring drug dealer, Pete (Carlos Sanson Jnr). The characters are somewhere between the lovable weirdos in books like Convenience Store Woman and the teenagers you’d find in Puberty Blues.
Being a mother, and the act of creation, is pretty inextricable. I’m not a mother, but I have one, and I think a lot about the sacrifices she made to be mine. I also think a lot about the sacrifices I might have to make if I accidentally-on-purpose decided to have a baby.
Similar sacrifices need to be made for writing, after all, what is good writing but money and time? Making art is selfish. Telling stories is selfish. Being a person is selfish. Lou struggles with this as a mother in Porpoise Pool, and so I struggle with it as a self-proclaimed part-time writer with a separate full-time job. Clare Dederer talks about writing, monsters and motherhood in this essay, and relevantly asks: “is your motherhood making you a less good writer?” It seems that the two acceptable life goals for people with uteruses are: motherhood or some kind of successful career (which usually isn’t an artistic one).
Zhou’s writing weaves a complex web of the relationships between mothers and children, using more “naturalistic” storylines like the comparison between absent/attentive mothers in Helen and Lou’s mother to demonstrate the impossible decisions that make them who they are. Stranger, surrealist scenes cast Helen as an octopus of sorts, and Pete as a seal, using their animal behaviour as a broader metaphor that again compares mothering styles: those who destroy their children, and those who destroy themselves.
These surreal, animal images from Porpoise Pool are my clearest memories of the play. Bright red octopus tentacles for hands are hard to forget, but they’re also memorable because they come with a question that has no singular answer: what kind of mother are you? What kind of writer are you? Do you efface yourself for your creations, or do you destroy your creations for your survival? Is it really that dramatic?
Other things I remember from Porpoise Pool stick out because they don’t quite fit into this elegant, simple question of the work. Elements of the direction, writing and production design distract from this central question: a third “mother-like” figure becomes a kind of owl for no discernible reason, and a doctor in Lou’s memory is cast as a shark. The actors bring somewhat mismatched approaches to their roles: some play their characters larger than life, and others play them as they might appear on the small screen. There’s a storyline running in the background about Lou’s apartment building being contaminated with some kind of chemical (which could explain the dream states that Lou finds herself in, but ultimately this story’s purpose isn’t so clear).
There’s something to be said here about trusting your audience, and by extension, trusting yourself. Porpoise Pool asks a very strong central question, but it seems that it doesn’t trust its audience enough to fill in the blanks around the question – giving us scenes and explanations that sometimes don’t fit. It’s a commendable effort, and an easy mistake to make: I too tend to overexplain things. I often don’t trust myself to know what I’m talking about or why I want to keep writing the way I do. I usually know how I feel about something before I know how to explain it.
When I saw Porpoise Pool I felt the crunch of green seaweed under my feet, the hard bench chair of Belvoir’s downstairs theatre under my bum and the uncomfortable presence of an increasingly furrowed brow. I remember laughing at Lou’s forthrightness, letting a little gasp escape when “House” became a real person. My brow furrowed deeper when some scenes involving an imaginary child intercut strangely beautiful and cohesive dream sequences and sound design. I remember the ice melting into my drink, and clinking against my glass as I tipped it into my mouth.
Immediately afterwards, I remember trying to justify to my housemate I’d taken along with me why the play was interesting, why I couldn’t quite place it. Why it was a clever idea, why it didn’t quite grab us how we wanted it to. Why this didn’t make it a “bad” thing, why maybe we might be wrong about something. Our voices echoed into the Devonshire Street tunnel on our way to the bus stop. We laughed about our relationships with our mothers (which are weirdly similar). We debated the ethics of not paying for the bus trip home, of not paying for the tickets to the show we just saw. We said things. We felt things. And now, I’m writing them.
If this essay was my baby, have I neglected it? It still hasn’t turned out quite how I wanted it to, and I still feel like I haven’t given it the time it deserved. Does that make it a failure? What would I have to do to make it “perfect”? We all make choices that we aren’t happy with, make art we think we could have made better. Lou isn’t the perfect mother, Porpoise Pool isn’t the perfect play. Does that make them unworthy?
Porpoise Pool played at Belvoir’s downstairs theatre from 7 —18 June 2023. Find more information here.
Images by Phil Erbacher
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
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