Beagle Review: The Shark is Broken, at TRP

Some tickets still available: the show is in Plymouth until Saturday April 5 with matinee and evening performances.

By The Captain, maritime correspondent for The Beagle

I was lucky enough to be able to see The Shark is Broken at Theatre Royal Plymouth on Tuesday evening. The performance started with someone coming on stage a couple of minutes after curtain up & declaring that “The shark really is broken”!

As this was 1st April, there was a brief moment of ‘is this a (late) April Fool?’, but after the safety curtain came down, it was assumed that there really was a problem and ten minutes later the performance started.

The ‘Shark’ is a proper play – something sadly quite rare in the theatre these days, with its usual diet of musicals and other light entertainment. It is written by Ian Shaw & Joseph Nixon, Ian being the son of Robert Shaw, who played Quint in the 1975 film Jaws (yes, it really was 50 years ago!)

Having seen the play, I decided to watch the film again (available on streaming). Jaws has aged very well. The animatronic shark is frightening, the three main characters (as portrayed in the play) are all well cast, and the 28-year-old Steven Spielberg (Jaws was his first blockbuster film) creates the sense of menace brilliantly.

The whole 90 minutes of the play (with no interval) takes place onboard Orca, Quint’s boat and the scenes are set between takes as the three characters get on each other’s nerves. The other two are the Amity Island police chief Brody, played by Roy Scheider in the film & Dan Fredenburgh on stage, and the shark expert Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film & Ashley Margolis on stage.

Ian Shaw says that the play is based on his father’s diaries. His father was clearly an alcoholic (he died 3 years after making Jaws), and Ian portrays him as such on stage. It is said that Robert Shaw was a method actor – so whilst onboard the Orca, he acted throughout as the irascible alcoholic Quint. He is certainly portrayed as being very antagonistic and almost antisemitic towards the “rich, East Coast boy “ Hooper.

One of the play’s recurring themes is Quint’s experiences of the sinking of USS Indianapolis in 1945. USS Indianapolis had been on a top-secret mission to deliver the first nuclear weapon ever used, the ‘Little Boy’ (dropped on Hiroshima), across the Pacific to Tinian Island, in the Mariana Islands. Her mission was so sensitive that very few people knew where she was or where so was going. On her return to the Philippines, she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank in 12 minutes. Of the crew of 1195, 300 died in the sinking and 316 were rescued. The remaining 579 died in the four days before a patrolling US Navy aircraft happened to spot them – many were taken by sharks - hence Quint’s fixation with killing sharks.

Today, Quint would undoubtedly have rightly been diagnosed with PTSD.

USS Indianapolis / Photo: US Pacific Fleet, Flickr, Creative Commons

The sinking of the Indianapolis was not well known to the public until years after WWII – undoubtedly the film Jaws was one of the factors that brought the USN’s worst ever loss of life to general notice.

This is a powerful portrayal of three, undoubtedly egotistical, men (they were actors after all) under considerable stress. The shoot was programmed to take two months and took 159 days. The broken shark (early animatronics were not that reliable), the fact that the weather needed to be similar, for continuity purposes, and the presence of other ships and boats in shot caused endless delays, leading to the long periods of tension, so well portrayed on stage.

The Shark is Broken premiered briefly in Brighton & then went to the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, where it shone & was moved to London & then Broadway.

The play is now on a UK Tour & will be on at the Theatre Royal until Saturday night.

Check for tickets here.