Three men in a boat – plus a malfunctioning shark and a load of laughs

The Shark Is Broken – A Must-See Comedy Hit!

Producers Sonia Friedman Productions, Scott Landis, GFour Productions and Kenny Wax will be bringing the forthcoming UK and Ireland tour of The Shark Is Broken, the behind-the-scenes West End and Broadway smash hit comedy about the making of the movie Jaws, to the Theatre Royal Nottingham from Wednesday 26 February to Saturday 1 March 2025.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1975 iconic blockbuster, the critically acclaimed Olivier award-nominated play, The Shark Is Broken, co-written by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, stars Ian Shaw as his father, Robert Shaw, alongside Dan Fredenburgh as Roy Scheider and Ashley Margolis as Richard Dreyfuss.

Inspired by Robert Shaw’s experience playing ‘Quint’ in Jaws, The Shark Is Broken is the brilliantly funny play which celebrates movie history as it peeks at the choppy waters behind Hollywood’s first blockbuster and imagines what happened on board ‘The Orca’ when the cameras stopped rolling during the filming of Steven Spielberg’s epic movie.

FADE IN: The open ocean, 1974. Filming is delayed… again. The lead actors – theatre veteran Robert Shaw and young Hollywood hotshots Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider – are crammed into a too-small boat, entirely at the mercy of foul weather and a faulty mechanical co-star. Alcohol flows, egos collide, and tempers flare on a chaotic voyage that just might lead to cinematic magic… if it doesn’t sink them all.

Following its critical and sell-out success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, The Shark Is Broken transferred to the West End in 2021 playing at the Ambassadors Theatre for a limited season where it enjoyed an extended run due to huge popular demand and an Olivier award nomination for Best Comedy Play. In July 2023 the production transferred to Broadway for a 16-week run at the John Golden Theatre where it garnered fresh critical acclaim.

Martha Geelan directs the tour of The Shark Is Broken, based on original direction by Guy Masterson, set and costume design by Duncan Henderson, lighting design by Jon Clark, sound design by Adam Cork, video design by Nina Dunn. Assistant director Molly Stacey, associate sound designer James Melling.

‘Playing my dad on stage is unlike anything I’ve done before’

As smash hit comedy The Shark is Broken sets out on a UK tour, co-writer Ian Shaw reveals why he wanted to write a play about the troubled making of Jaws, and what it’s like to play his dad, legendary actor Robert Shaw.

When Jaws hit cinemas in the summer of 1975, it was a blockbuster success unlike anything the film industry had seen. The story of a killer shark terrorising a small American town set the template for summer flicks for decades to come, but its behind-the-scenes drama has become the stuff of similar legend: mechanical sharks broke down, boats sank, actors argued fiercely and the script changed day by day.

The Shark is Broken, which embarks on a UK tour after smash runs in the West End and on Broadway, is set in those long, tense gaps between filming. It focuses on the relationships between the film’s three lead actors, Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, who found themselves stuck on a small boat called the Orca for 16 weeks with little to do except drive each other crazy.

The play’s co-writer and actor Ian Shaw admired the work of two of those actors, Scheider and Dreyfuss, but it was the third, Robert Shaw, playing grizzled seadog Quint, that particularly interested him, and for a very good reason: Robert Shaw was Ian’s dad.

“I’d spent my life trying not to be associated with my dad, as most children of famous people tend to do,” says Shaw. “You want to carve your own path, so I was wary of that. But I’m obsessed with films and I’m obsessed with the story of filmmaking. This was a particularly juicy story. I just imagined three men stuck on this boat, marooned out in the water. Something about that idea appealed to me. I’ve reached a point now where I guess the comparison with my dad doesn’t matter so much. I’m also at the same age as my dad when he was doing Jaws, and I just feel less sensitive about the comparison now.”

But almost as soon as he started thinking about the idea, he lost faith. “I thought it might be in poor taste to play my father and to portray him like that, so I put it in a drawer. It wasn’t until a while later that I had a pint with a friend who thought it was a good idea, so I looked at it again. My wife and family all thought it was interesting. So I decided that I should take the risk.”

Along with co-writer Joseph Nixon, Ian dug into the thrilling history of a film that was very familiar to him. There’s a photograph of a five-year-old Ian on a studio lot peeking under a sheet that covers the body of a vast mechanical shark called Bruce. Ian spent a lot of time visiting his father on film sets as a young boy, he explains, “and they were mostly very boring places, with nothing happening”. But when they pulled the sheet off Bruce, he was “incredibly impressed and a little scared”. He remembers meeting 28 year old Spielberg, too: “he tousled my hair, and I remember thinking that he was too young to be in charge of my dad.”

Ian didn’t just want the play to be a rehash of the famous stories from the making of Jaws. He wanted it to be an exploration of different types of actors, different outlooks on life, as well as addiction, and the idea of father figures. “We looked at things they said in real life, so a lot of the play is in their own words.” His dad is portrayed as a witty, erudite, charismatic man – but also an alcoholic, who could be cutting and cruel. “I wanted to get into his character. He was an artist in pursuit of the truth, and he felt it was a slight tragedy to be doing work that was so commercial. He agonised about that.”

Meanwhile, as well as writing the play, Ian knew he wanted to play his own father, too. But it was a daunting prospect. In 1975, Robert Shaw was already one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. He’d had a stellar stage career in the UK, appearing in many Shakespeare roles and most of Harold Pinter’s plays, combined with roles in beloved Hollywood films like A Man For All Seasons, The Sting and The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three.

Robert Shaw died in 1978, when Ian was just eight years old, and while Ian had maintained a professional distance from his dad, in his personal life he was a devoted fan as well as a loving son. “I adored my father, and I thought he was a wonderful actor. I knew his work so well that to some extent playing him felt like putting on a glove. I felt like I’d never researched a character as thoroughly as I had Robert.”

The Shark is Broken opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, and Ian thought it might attract a few devoted Jaws fans. Instead, it earned glowing reviews. It was performed in a pair with another play, but proved so popular – queues snaking along the streets outside the venue, celebrities lining up to get tickets – that they cancelled the other play in order to put on more performances of The Shark is Broken.

“It was a complete shock. I really didn’t expect it. Before I went on stage for the first time I thought it was possibly going to be a car crash. I didn’t know if audiences would find it funny, or if they would think it was distasteful, me stepping into my father’s shoes and showing his flaws. I had many sleepless nights before we opened, worried that my family would be offended.”

Instead, audiences were delighted by Shaw and Nixon’s script, seeing the world of Jaws come to life with Duncan Henderson’s beautifully detailed replica of the Orca. ‘You’re going to need a bigger theatre,’ the critics said – so a West End run followed, and then the play transferred to Broadway to the John Golden Theatre. That was the theatre where, in 1958, John Osborne’s seminal play Look Back in Anger received its American premiere, starring acclaimed actress Mary Ure – who happened to be Ian’s mum. “She died when I was very young, and though I feel like I really remembered my dad, I don’t really remember my mum terribly well. But performing on that stage was a particularly proud moment.”

Now The Shark is Broken is embarking on a UK tour, and Ian is getting ready once again to don the moustache and cap that bring out the striking resemblance to his father. “It’s a funny thing, being there in the dressing room and looking in the mirror before I go on, doing a bit of the famous Indianapolis speech from the film that my dad helped to write, just to make sure that I feel in character. I’m not somebody who believes in spiritual things very much, but there’s definitely a dialogue between me and my dad before I go on stage. It’s not like anything I’ve ever done in my life before.”

The Shark is Broken is touring from 23 January 2025 through until 17 May, ending in Dublin at the Gaiety Theatre.

The Shark is Broken

Photos: Manuel Harlan