Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon
Sonia Friedman Productions, Scott Landis, GFour Productions and Kenny Wax
Lowry, Salford
February 4-8, 2025; 1hr 30mins
(also at Newcastle Theatre Royal, March 18-22 and other venues)
There are some theatrical images from our past lives we simply can't erase. One of mine is an encounter with Jaws at Universal Studios, Orlando, a few years before they demolished what was by the end an ageing, creaking and expensive animatronic.
We first went on the boat ride in daylight, and it was nothing special. But then we did a “fright night” tour. The building was pitch black and we were hit with the full Jaws filmset package of terrifying sound, lighting and special effects. At the end everyone came off the boat with their nerves shredded, swearing they would never go out in the dark again – on land, let alone on water.
So I approached The Shark is Broken - a play about the making of Spielberg's iconic movie - knowing that it was a comedy-drama but still with a visceral nervousness from all those years ago. And of course, that's the point. A run-of-the-mill blockbuster may be a star for the summer months, but Jaws is forever.
The play’s set, a claustrophobic fishing boat cleverly designed by Duncan Henderson with ramshackle disorder but clean movement lines, is backed by a relentless vista of ocean from award-winning video designer Nina Dunn. That brooding sea does just enough to unsettle throughout, provoking the kind of anxiety that finally floors Richard Dreyfuss (Ashley Margolis). There is a hint of the infamous theme tune, but we need no more than that; the audience (with a large cohort of dads) has probably been playing it in their head since they left home.
Lighting designer Jon Clark presents a wonderfully cinematic image on stage – as sharply focused as the big screen on which this will all eventually play out.
Within this homage to a film that 50 years ago changed the course of cinema is a tale of three men and their relationship to the deadly serious and simultaneously absurd nonsense that is film making.
This is unapologetically an insider’s play. Writer Ian Shaw, who plays his own father, Robert Shaw playing the film’s shark hunter Quint (keep up), based the film on his own recollections and the reality of the situation the actors found themselves in. The animatronic shark really did break down constantly; they did sit in a boat for weeks waiting for director Steven Spielberg to call “action”; Roy Sheider (Dan Fredenburgh) spent a lot of time topping up his tan and Robert Shaw was an alcoholic.
The play provides some fine actorly interludes. Shaw reprises the film’s monologue on the sinking of the USS Indianapolis (“Eleven hundred men went in the water, 316 men came out. The sharks took the rest”). And there are several well-integrated Shakespearean moments – a touch of Lear here, a sonnet recitation there – along with hat-tips to his Westhoughton-born, Oscar-nominated father’s work with Harold Pinter.
But it is the pace and light touch of the script, the surprising number of laugh-out-loud moments and the sharp dialogue that make this three-hander positively skip along.
The term icon is much misused these days, but I make no apologies for using the label for Jaws – and this show is a fitting tribute to its iconic status.
More info and tickets here
