Ian Shaw on Jaws and playing his dad
How a Jaws-inspired play comes to be surfacing at the Theatre Royal
One of the great blockbuster movies of the 1970s, Jaws burst onto the big screen with long-lasting effect, painting the great white shark as humanity’s underwater nemesis and putting umpteen holidaymakers off sea swimming for life.
A woman becomes a late night snack in the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s first big film and she’s just victim number one. The monster predator will be back.
Remembering those teeth and the blood in the water, I tell Ian Shaw that I don’t remember it being a particularly funny film.
He disagrees. “I think it is funny. Quint is, at times, quite funny and there’s humour there when they’re trying to persuade the mayor not to serve people up for dinner.
“It’s not written like a Neil Simon comedy but it does have its lovely lighter moments.”
A quick Wiki search reveals that Spielberg did, indeed, engage a comedy writer, Carl Gottlieb, to add levity to the screenplay.
And who hasn’t subsequently enjoyed a joke involving John Williams’s Oscar-winning score with its ominous staccato beat?
Ian is the actor son of the late Robert Shaw, the Lancashire-born actor and film star who played Quint, the hard-bitten fisherman who accepts the challenge to hunt the shark and make the seaside safe again.
He says he has always loved Jaws and now he has co-written (with comedy writing friend Joseph Nixon) a play called The Shark is Broken which is berthing at the Theatre Royal next week and in which he plays his dad.
How do you do the shark? I ask him.
“The shark isn’t working,” he replies. “It’s broken.” The clue is rather in the title.
“What we’re focusing on is three men, at different stages of their careers, in a boat. We’re not trying to re-do Jaws.”
Instead the play takes us off camera to where Robert Shaw and American co-stars Roy Scheider, who plays police chief Brody, and Richard Dreyfuss, cast as marine biologist Hooper, are waiting in a boat called the Orca for Spielberg’s temperamental mechanical shark to be fixed.
You can see the comic potential here, three big egos trapped in close confinement at sea while they kill time for hour after hour.
Ian says on one occasion Dreyfuss, the youngest of the trio and “relatively fresh off the blocks”, tipped Shaw’s whisky overboard. Shaw, being rather more than a social drinker, took umbrage.
The film was a huge box office success, recouping its inflated budget many times over. Most circling critics suppressed their shark-like instincts and praised it. All well and good.
But when Ian encountered Richard Dreyfuss in 1994 he realised the scars left by Jaws had cut deep.
The (by now) Hollywood bigshot had whipped up a media feeding frenzy by agreeing to direct a production of Hamlet in Birmingham and Ian auditioned for a part.
“When I introduced myself he looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach,” he recalls.
“The chemistry between them all on screen was so good that I’d assumed they’d all got on, or at least that the battles (revealed in Gottlieb’s book, The Jaws Log) had been forgotten.”
Not so, clearly. Ian didn’t get a part, although he has done his fair share of Shakespeare and remembers appearing at the Theatre Royal in a production of Much Ado About Nothing with Mark Rylance and Janet McTeer.
Robert Shaw died of a heart attack in 1978, at the relatively young age of 51, when Ian was just eight.
Eventually he followed both his parents into the acting profession (his mother, the Oscar-nominated Mary Ure, died even younger, in 1975, the year Jaws was released).
Robert was an accomplished writer as well as an actor, producing novels and plays, but Ian, speaking for himself, says he would have been quite happy to stick with acting.
Although he has had a mostly busy career, he admits: “One reason this came about was because there wasn’t much being offered to me at that particular time.”
The Dreyfuss encounter made him think. Then, in 2005, he was cast in a TV docu-drama called Hiroshima as Colonel Paul Tibbets, the American pilot of the Enola Gay which dropped the first atomic bomb.
In Jaws, the character of Quint is a survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, torpedoed by the Japanese in July 1945 after it had delivered crucial components of the bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian which had been seized by the Allies as a military base.
Hundreds of American sailors perished in the sea, many of them falling victim to sharks.
With these curious connections brewing in his mind, Ian wrote a first draft of a play.
“But then I put it away in a drawer because I thought it was insane. It all seemed a bit too complicated and there was no way I was going to play my father.”
But when friends, including Nixon, got sight of it, they saw the potential and the play The Shark is Broken went down a storm at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019.
It progressed to the West End where it got five-star reviews and an Olivier Award nomination and also had a run on Broadway where it was similarly well received (although reportedly Richard Dreyfuss had reservations about how he was portrayed).
Reflecting on the early performances, Ian says: “I was expecting it to attract some interest but I thought we might be doing it in village halls rather than going to Broadway.”
Now in 2025 comes this first UK tour and so far, says Ian, it has attracted a “really interesting mix” of people.
“There are the Jaws fans, wearing Jaws stuff and usually seated in the front rows, but there are other people too, people who are interested in movies in general and then the traditional theatre audience.
“It’s a lovely group because you get different laughs at different points for different reasons. I think it appeals to a certain type of humour and I’ve really enjoyed doing it.”
Asked if he feels the presence of his father, he says: “I’ve always felt very close to him anyway. When your father dies when you’re eight years old, it’s hard. He’s your hero.
“But although he has passed away, the relationship continues. It just alters. I’m about the same age now as he was when he was in Jaws so I probably feel more like a brother than a son.”
The Shark is Broken, with Ian as Robert Shaw, Dan Fredenburgh as Roy Scheider and Ashley Margolis as Richard Dreyfuss, runs from Tuesday, March 18 to Saturday, March 22. Tickets from the Theatre Royal box office.