The Shark is Broken, written by Joseph Nixon and Ian Shaw (who also stars playing his own father Robert Shaw), is a speculative play set behind the scenes of Steven Spielberg’s suspenseful shark blockbuster Jaws. With a troubled production, where the animatronic sharks, affectionately named Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer, kept breaking down, it left the three main cast members stranded together and impatiently waiting for someone to shout “action!”
With the play, Nixon and Shaw imagine the conversations a young Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider may have engaged in, confined in the Orca boat in the middle of the Ocean, taking inspiration from Carl Gottlieb’s The Jaws Log, the movie and Shaw’s personal diaries.
Actor and writer Ian Shaw (pictured above) talks to SciFiNow about playing his father and his time spent in Martha’s Vineyard in 1974 during the shoot of Jaws.
You’ve been performing this version of the play since October 2021 at The Ambassador’s Theatre, so what is the scene you most love to perform?
It’s a hell of a thing to do the Indianapolis speech. I suppose that was the cornerstone of the play really and the movie. A lot of people who like Jaws love that scene the most… Some fans have said that it gives them chills. It’s just a beautiful speech. Apart from that, personally the centre of the play for me is… I love the scene where they’re all on The Orca, and they’re drinking. They actually start to have a laugh, and get to know each other before the Indianapolis speech. We recreated that in the play, when they’re all having a drink and they’re talking about their fathers, with the true story of my father losing his father. This is the scene that has the most meaning for me, because it’s echoed in my own experience.
You co-wrote the play with Joseph Nixon, can you talk us through the process of writing it together, especially the way in which you balance drama and comedy?
We took a lot of inspiration from Jaws. One of the things that me and Joseph took was the tone. When you’re watching the movie it’s quite hard to know what’s gonna happen next, because it shifts mood quite swiftly. I don’t know whether people pick up on this, but we thought it would be fun to pay homage to the peculiar tone the movie has. People forget, if they haven’t seen the film for a while, just how funny it is. Obviously because the shark was broken so much, they were all improvising and throwing in their own individual bits of comedy as well. I know that my father brought some of the singing to the movie because he played a pirate years and years before in The Buccaneers. That was his big break in a way.
What were your reservations about playing your father and was there something in particular that convinced you to go forward with the play?
Initially, I was almost reluctant to even speak about it. I had the idea and then I just shelved it. I think it was probably having a beer actually, and talking with one of my best friends, who sadly is no longer with us… and the original producer for Edinburgh, Duncan Henderson. They were very helpful in pushing me towards writing it. Then I mentioned it to other people and everybody seemed to think it was a brilliant idea except for myself. I thought I was putting my head into a hangman’s noose because I just thought that I was going to get the tone wrong.
I tried to avoid shouting about my dad because I wanted to be an actor in my own right. I guess that’s the advantage of being a little older, when you think well, ‘I’ve already had a career’ and I felt like I’d established myself in my own right, so I thought, well, maybe this is a good idea.
Then what really made me feel more comfortable was in the process of writing it, I realised that it wasn’t really about me and my father, it was about fathers and sons, it was about addiction, it was about making movies. It was about so many things that encompass a lot of people’s experiences that it became universal.
I know you read your father’s drinking diary as part of your research and Carl Gottlieb’s The Jaws Log. Was there anything in particular you learned about your father that surprised you?
I was surprised how much I agreed with what my father felt. He was quite outspoken, and he was very candid. Watching some of the interviews that he gave, they’re not like today. It feels like everything is filtered through a PR or an agent or whatever. Everybody’s so happy and their careers are so wonderful! My father talks about his father dying on the Dick Cavett Show quite openly and the audience is very quiet. It’s very interesting, how the tone has shifted. I was very interested to learn about how he felt about so many issues that I completely agree with.
There’s a line in The Shark Is Broken about living past the age of your father – it really stuck with us – did you come up with that?
It was a collaboration with Joseph, I think. It is something you think about, and it’s very present for me because I’m now that age where I’m a little older than Robert was when he died and the same age as my grandfather when he died. I think Joseph wrote that line, after weeks of us talking about it.
There’s a great photo of you on-set visiting Bruce the shark and your father, so how much time did you spend in Martha’s Vineyard?
We were there for a good long while but I wasn’t interested in the filming at all. It seemed to be very boring apart from meeting the shark. That was frightening to me. I remember playing on the beach much more than I remember filming. I do remember meeting Spielberg and him being friendly. I met him, and in my memory, which is not entirely reliable when you’re five, but my memory is of him hopping about with a small camera or a Super 8 camera, so I’ve often wondered whether he has any footage of Jaws.
Maybe that will come out for the 50th Anniversary!
Maybe! That would be amazing.
The Shark is Broken will be at The Ambassadors Theatre until 13 February. Book your tickets here. Image credit: Helen Maybanks
