Theatre review: The Shark is Broken

This claustrophobic space in which the actors wait to be told that Spielberg is at last ready to shoot another scene is set within an infinity of sea and sky (video design Nina Dunn). Clouds scoot across the expanse as conversation and conflict between the three actors ebbs and flows.

The clash is between the Jewish Dreyfuss (Liam Murray) and Shaw’s hard-drinking thespian, played by the star’s son Ian who looks so uncannily like his father his mere presence lends the evening authenticity. Demetri Goritsas is the even-tempered Schneider, who is much more interested in reading the paper than he is in squaring up to his co-stars.

It is Murray’s Dreyfuss who is the most provocative in the trio. While surrounded by water his New York Jewish angst is never far below the surface. Jews are not meant to be on the wet stuff he declares, his discomfort accentuated by Spielberg’s decision to shoot the film off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard instead of in a studio tank. When it is pointed out that Jesus walked across water happily enough Dreyfuss replies “And look what happened to him?”

But it is the self obsession of Dreyfuss’s “process” that mostly rubs Shaw’s old campaigner up the wrong way. The younger actor is wracked with self-doubt about his talent, while Shaw is anchored by years of touring Shakespeare in English provincial towns. In that sense the play is as much about the changing of the guard between two different types of film star.

Another example of this would be Sheider’s next film Marathon Man in which the Jewish/English Old-school dynamic of Dreyfuss and Shaw was replicated by the young Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier.

If Shaw the younger ever wanted to write a sequel to his terrific Jaws play he could do worse than looking to that movie for inspiration. And on the evidence of his Shaw, he’d make a convincing Olivier.