Steven Spielberg’s original blockbuster Jaws was a hugely difficult film to make – and its behind the scenes story has become a West End show.
London’s glittering West End is known for all-singing, all-dancing spectacle – not to mention the neon lights and pulsating nightspots so memorably depicted by Edgar Wright in his recent movie Last Night in Soho.
But perhaps the most enjoyable and invigorating evening you can spend in the capital at the moment involves watching three men chatting and squabbling on a boat. The men are Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw – stars of Jaws – and the show is the brilliant The Shark is Broken.
But the production is far more than simply a journey through the making of one of the most acclaimed and successful movies of all time. It’s a musing on the challenges of acting and on the different brands of masculinity represented by three performers at wildly different stages of their career, embroiled in one of the most challenging shoots in Hollywood history.
There’s also the small matter of the presence of Ian Shaw – son of Robert – as not only the co-writer of the play but also the actor portraying the role of his father with an uncanny, surreal accuracy.
“I really didn’t think it was a good idea,” Shaw tells me over the phone. “Nobody knew who I was necessarily, but I thought it would be career suicide to some degree. I had spent my whole life trying to avoid association with my dad and to carve my own path. We were potentially going to be dealing with some of the darker sides of his life and I didn’t want to come across as some sort of judge and jury on him. I didn’t want to humiliate him, but obviously you can’t put him on a pedestal.”
Shaw was convinced to push ahead with the project and approached his friend Joseph Nixon – an experienced playwright – to work on the script. He drew material from his father’s drinking diary, public comments by the actors, Carl Gottlieb’s exhaustive book The Jaws Log and “family memories”. Shaw himself was only four years old when his father was away filming.
The play debuted to acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, with the subsequent West End transfer scheduled for 2020 and delayed due to the pandemic. Shaw, though, believes the last year has only made the themes of the show more relevant. “Having gone through lockdown, a lot of people relate to the idea of being stuck with someone you don’t necessarily always get on with. It’s almost like Christmas, but without the fun.”
Alongside Shaw’s take on his father, the London run of the play at the Ambassadors Theatre – former home of record-breaking West End stalwart The Mousetrap – stars Demetri Goritsas as Scheider and Liam Murray Scott as Dreyfuss. Scott gets the jittery, rising star energy of Dreyfuss just right, while Goritsas is so impressive at replicating Scheider’s old school cool that I’m stunned when Shaw tells me the actor only watched Jaws for the first time on the night before his audition. “He was really playing catch-up. He’s a talented fellow.” That’s an understatement.
A running thread through The Shark is Broken is Robert Shaw’s attempts to nail one of the most iconic Jaws scenes – the Indianapolis speech. We see several aborted takes throughout the show, culminating in a goosebumps-inducing rendition of the finished article. The younger Shaw tells me he rewatches the scene from the movie at least once a week in order to ensure his imitation is spot on and laughs that it is “undoubtedly true” when I point out he has now done the famous speech many more times than his father ever did. “It’s quite surreal. I was very nervous the first time that had to be done, for sure. You’ve just got to give it a shot. I think in rehearsals the first time I did it, I’m sure I was awful.”
And more broadly, it must be strange to step into the persona of your father for eight shows a week? Shaw isn’t convinced. “The more you do something, the more comfortable it feels and the more confident you are, I suppose. That’s sort of the nature of performance, in a way. It starts to feel normal. It was weird doing it the first time and the first few times, but now I feel like it’s putting on a glove really.”
“I adore acting more than [my father] did in a way,” Shaw adds. “He was very successful and became a little bit jaded by some of the business aspects of showbiz and wanted to do more artistic things. I just love being involved in the storytelling process, whether it’s writing or acting – in this case, I’m thrilled to be doing both. To stay in the game of telling stories, for me, is just heaven.”
The Shark is Broken has been wowing audiences since October – “my overriding feeling isn’t happiness to start with, it’s just relief,” says Shaw of the positive response – and recently had its limited run at the Ambassadors extended until 13th February next year.
Shaw also says there has been “some interest” in a possible film version of the story. Perhaps surprisingly, he is happy to eventually pass the baton and allow another actor to step into his father’s rather intimidating shoes, whether that’s on stage or on the big screen. “I felt I knew him so well and looked like him and I felt that I should give it the first shot. I really hope that it gets taken on by somebody else at some point.”
After Shaw’s incredible performance, that would certainly require a brave actor. I think I’d rather take my chances with the shark.
