Jaws is on pause. The shark is broken, again, and the actors Robert Shaw (Quint), Richard Dreyfuss (Hooper) and Roy Scheider (Brody) are stuck together on a boat in the middle of the ocean for 16 weeks. As Shaw loftily says, "being on a slow boat to China with Bridget Bardot and Rachel Welch would be bad enough, but with you guys...?"
Days drag, slightly enlivened by cards or shove ha’penny, and Shaw, witty, erudite, charismatic, hard-drinking, is particularly cruel on the young Dreyfuss, whom he regards as a conceited, ignorant brat, deliberately tricking him into calling an irascible Harold Pinter, whom he knows will bawl out the ambitious, naïve young actor.
But the old stager reveals his own inner doubts, having come to denigrate his own profession, especially when involved in what he regards as popular rubbish. Dreyfuss, over-ambitious in his desire to play Shakespeare, is only suited to play the fool, Shaw tells him, and as a storm blows up, Shaw mounts the gunwale to brave hurricanoes like Lear.
The shark itself fails to make an appearance, except for a fin briefly spotted in the back video projection at the start of the show. Written by Robert’s son Ian, with Joseph Nixon, it might equally be called A Voyage Round my Father, if John Mortimer had not got there first.
Ian was four or five when he visited the set of Jaws in 1975 and was terrified when he peered under a tarpaulin at the animatronic monster. Just three years later, his father died, so when in the play Shaw senior laments that his own much admired but alcoholic father died when he was 12, and that he might otherwise have been able to help him, one hears the voice of the son expressing the same sentiment in this affectionate and gripping play.
Ian Shaw has the look, the stentorian tone of his old man, to whom he attaches a cruelty born of frustration, but also a moment of redeeming kindness as he soothes Dreyfuss’s panic attack.
Ashley Margolis is superb as the latter, arrogant and timid at the same time, in awe of Shaw while overplaying his own importance to the film, while Dan Fredenburgh as Roy Scheider is the unflappable peacemaker, without whom one imagines either Shaw or Dreyfuss would have been shark food.
Robert Shaw apparently wanted to be remembered more as a writer, something of an irony given this fond, funny, clear-eyed depiction of an episode in his life as an actor by his actor / writer son. Yet the play delivers an apt epitaph, as Robert delivers Quint’s soliloquy about the loss of 139 men in shark-infested waters during World War Two. The actor wrote it himself, after rejecting Steven Spielberg’s original script, and it is mesmerising.
The play runs for 90 fast-moving minutes without an interval. Its tour continues to Salford, Richmond, Nottingham, Bath, Canterbury, Newcastle, Guildford, Plymouth, Brighton, Cheltenham, Poole, Birmingham and Dublin until 17 May 2025.