REVIEW: The Shark is Broken, Theatre Royal
Memories of Jaws nudged by a play in which no fish features
No shark (it was temperamental in the film so once bitten, twice shy) and no preamble either, other than the merest hint – enough to prompt laughter - of the ominous John Williams score.
Then we’re straight into the action – or rather the inaction.
Ian Shaw’s play, co-authored with Joseph Nixon, recalls the making of Jaws from the perspective of three men in a boat – not Jerome K. Jerome’s pleasure-seeking pals on the Thames, but waiting actors going potty off the coast of New England.
It’s 1974 and Robert Shaw (played by son Ian), Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are killing time aboard a vessel called the Orca while rookie director Steven Spielberg gets his temperamental fake shark - nicknamed Bruce - ship-shape.
Terrific set, a boat spliced open lengthways with an ever-changing seascape projected behind – seabirds, clouds and setting sun to boot. At times you’d swear the vessel really was bobbing on the waves.
We meet the trio as they’re already grating on each other’s nerves, or rather the young Dreyfuss, garrulous, cocky, a city boy out of his comfort zone, is getting on the nerves of Shaw, the Englishman with Shakespeare on his CV.
Actually, it’s hard to see how anyone wouldn’t get on Shaw’s nerves, steadied as they are by frequent recourse to the bottle which at one point Dreyfuss drops overboard.
Shaw was hired by Spielberg to play Quint, the hard-bitten shark fisherman; Dreyfuss (Ashley Margolis) the marine biologist, Hooper. Scheider, the most level-headed of the trio (played by Dan Fredenburgh), plays peacemaker as he waits to do his stuff as Brody, the police chief.
For film buffs and Jaws fans, there is much to like. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” one of the trio quips at one point, to more laughs among the cognoscenti.
Hindsight provides much of the mirth, however, including moans about Spielberg and the certain knowledge no-one will be talking about this film in 50 years’ time. And whatever next? Flying saucers? Dinosaurs? We in the audience titter knowingly.
It’s an endearing play, more so when you know how personal a story it is to Ian Shaw, playing his alcoholic father who at one point remembers his own alcoholic father who took his own life.
He plays the tough guy, urging his young American co-star to play shove ha’penny and do press-ups, and to ring testy playwright Harold Pinter after arming with him all the wrong kind of advice; but you sense the vulnerability in a man aware he’s perhaps becoming a bit of a dinosaur.
The USS Indianapolis speech from the film, delivered by Quint, a fictional survivor of the real-life wartime disaster when the ship which had delivered the atom bomb was sunk and most of its crew perished, recurs in the play.
Shaw at first scoffs at it, then offers to re-write it and finally delivers it before the lights dim.
It makes for a touching, low key climax to a play that would work well in a studio theatre but is by no means diminished on the big stage.
And the rest, as they say, is history – cinematic history of which the territory explored over 95 minutes (no interval either) provides an interesting and richly entertaining footnote.
The Shark is Broken runs until Saturday, March 22. Tickets from the Theatre Royal box office.