The Shark Is Broken
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s film from 1975, was a notoriously chaotic production, riddled with mishaps and other stumbling blocks that paradoxically coalesced into the birth of the modern Hollywood blockbuster.
“Bruce”, the shark, one of three malfunctioning mechanical models, seldom worked in the seawater, leaving the film-maker to rely on shadowy glimpses and John Williams’s tremendous score. That same iconic soundtrack is playfully referenced in Adam Cork’s score for this inventive making-of stage production.
In Spielberg’s film the mismatched personalities of the shark hunter, Quint (Robert Shaw), the police chief, Brody (Roy Scheider), and the marine biologist, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), form a reluctant camaraderie in their quest to kill the murderous fish.
The Shark Is Broken merrily mirrors this dynamic in its clever re-creation of the many weeks of downtime that the trio endured. Together they bicker, booze, bond and vomit overboard.
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Ian Shaw, one of Robert Shaw’s nine children, plays Robert, investing meaning and metatextuality in the material. (He also cowrote the play, with Joseph Nixon.) The younger Shaw’s uncanny approximation of his father is met by the jocular precision of Dan Fredenburgh, playing Scheider, and Ashley Margolis, as Dreyfuss. No tic is unmined.
Over a series of vignettes, stomped out on Duncan Henderson’s thrilling re-creation of the Orca, the three actors shift register between Oedipal soul-searching, buffoonery and banter.
Fredenburgh’s Scheider is the sincere, socially conscious son of a garage mechanic who has nightmares about images emerging from the Vietnam War but loves a good tan. Shaw is a knot of braggadocio, hilarity and wounds. Margolis brings heart and good humour to the swaggering, coke-snorting Dreyfuss – only 26 at the time – who ends up with many of the play’s best zingers: “Nothing good ever happened to any Jew on the water,” he laments.
Bobbing along in Nina Dunn’s immersive digital re-creation of the stretch of Atlantic Ocean just off Martha’s Vineyard where Spielberg expensively shot the film, the prophetic meta-jokes come thick and fast.
“There will never be a more immoral president than Tricky Dicky,” Scheider says of Richard Nixon. Acting as a movieverse Cassandra, Shaw warns that cinema will descend into a muddle of sequels and remakes.
Heartfelt and intimate details, ranging from the suicide of Robert Shaw’s father to a shout-out to the actor’s adopted home in Tourmakeady, Co Mayo, are counterpointed by top-notch film buffery and broad physical comedy.
A wealth of research is parlayed, roughly at times, into a proudly commercial three-hander. For all its historical heft, both personal and cinematic, the writing and direction wisely lean into irreverence throughout this 80-minute crowd-pleaser.
The Shark Is Broken is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, May 17th
