★★★★★
Upon sitting down at the ornate Athenaeum Theatre to see the Melbourne premiere of The Shark Is Broken, I am in awe of what I see onstage.
A makeshift film set magically designed by James Browne is already in full swing, with a film crew milling about, manning an iconic replica of a boat called The Orca. Smoke is coming out of its chimney. Scaffolding is on either side of the boat, with cameras, fans and ropes.
This is where the crew sit, smoking cigarettes, waiting for their instructions to film another take. There is a lookout on top to view the sharks and the whales. The mast, another lookout, is where you would look for fish. There are tie-down points on the right and left-hand sides of the vessel.
Behind it is a huge video screen designed by Cameron Smith, projecting an ocean moving up and down, giving the effect that the boat is adrift somewhere in the sea. Seagulls are flying above an ocean view. Clouds are moving across the horizon. It is sunrise.
Familiar ominous music conceived by Sean Peter juts out of the theatre sound system to get the crowd going. It succeeds, and we are only five minutes in.
For those of us who recall the film Jaws, it’s as if we have hopped in a time capsule. Back to a simpler, pre-internet time. Before the existence of mobile phones, before the seeds of social media even existed. Where, if you were stuck on a film set, you had to communicate face-to-face with others or survive in solitude.
For those were the days of having to either sink or swim when facing inner struggles. Of having to endure the silence of your own thoughts, through the peaks and troughs. Even when your mind was swimming away from the sharks. As was the case for the three men in this thrilling Australian production.
The Shark Is Broken is a fictionalised, behind-the-scenes style comedy about the making of the first iconic Jaws movie. It is written by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon and briefly premiered in 2019 at the Rialto Theatre in Brighton, England, followed by performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Its West End premiere was in 2021, followed by Broadway in 2023. Since then, it’s had successful runs in the US, the UK, Canada and now Australia.
The year is 1974. We are on the set of a movie about a killer shark that is on the loose. It is being directed by a young 27-year-old unknown visionary named Steven Spielberg.
It stars three ‘actors’: Richard Dreyfuss, a rising New York-born actor on the cusp of stardom; Robert Shaw, a British-born theatre veteran and film actor in both Britain and Hollywood, respectively; and Roy Scheider, a rising Hollywood actor, who is leaving behind tough-guy character roles to chase something bigger.
These three actors are in the eighth week of filming the movie, and tensions are rising. The mechanical shark named Bruce keeps breaking down, and filming keeps getting delayed.
The problem? The film is not only two million dollars over budget but is being filmed on the fly due to unpredictable weather conditions. Frustration is setting in. Their careers are important to them, and they fear Jaws is going to be a one-hit wonder or even worse, a dud.
The crew announce that the shark is broken again. This is repeated constantly in the first part of the show, to everyone’s delight, almost to the point where a kind of foreshadowing is sensed when the Jaws music suddenly jumps out at us – and the lights go dark.
Yet it has nothing to do with the shark. It has something to do with these men, who are thrust together like sardines, having no choice but to withstand the company of one another on an isolated boat on an oceanic film set.
Then a mechanical shark’s broken fin is rolled across the stage, and everyone rolls with laughter. It gives us pause to relegate our attention to the actual story about three men in a boat, two of whom have fairly large egos.
Starting with Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss, men who are on opposite ends of their career spectrums. One is a true theatre veteran with serious acting credentials. The other a newbie, and terribly ambitious, about to rocket into the Hollywood stratosphere.
Yet, they have much in common: they both suffer from their own issues. They both have massive egos. And they are so desperate to hide their pain that they turn to alcohol and substances to curb it and get through the shoot.
They become so consumed by their own ego perches that their personalities start to clash. Shaw looks down on Dreyfuss and thinks of him as a village idiot. Dreyfuss is enamoured by Shaw’s career, but he slowly resents the way he treats him, teasing him about his own unproven trajectory.
Because of this, Dreyfuss becomes more neurotic by the day and develops anxiety, frequently taking cocaine to overcome his insecurities, which only causes more friction. In the meantime, Shaw sneaks hoards of alcohol on the boat to feed his addiction.
In the middle sits Scheider, the go-between. A peaceful soul (unlike his film persona), he spends the majority of his time reading. Part philosopher; part factophile, he reflects deeply upon the world around him. He places it upon himself to be the mediator of the other two men.
His role is to keep life on this boat emotionally and physically balanced. He ultimately breaks a rigorous fight apart when Shaw bullies Dreyfuss so badly that he ends up throwing Shaw’s alcohol off the side of the boat, thereby saving the movie from real destruction.
The three actors in this production are simply golden. Robert Goldsworthy packs a punch, embodying Dreyfuss with the identical dishevelled look, high-pitched nasal voice, nervous giggle and anxiety-ridden, exhaustive, squirrel-like mannerisms.
Goldsworthy performs the entire spectrum of his role with conscientious clarity, exemplifying why Dreyfuss became such an iconic actor of his generation.
Tom Stokes is a perfect doppelgänger for Roy Scheider, embodying the essence of neutrality, a renaissance man with incremental precision. The eternal thinker. Yet in movies, he acts as the tough guy. His enlightened, well-balanced energy is coupled with emotional bravery in keeping with his character’s difficult upbringing.
Anthony Gooley, as the brogue-ish and egocentric Robert Shaw, is as generously funny as he is tragic. He expresses the life and no-holds-barred gregarious persona of a veteran actor, full of vim and vigour.
Yet he is also full of emotional pull, bringing the house down with his final monologue expressing the pain of a man who sometimes exists under lock and key, deep into the very depths of our being.
After the storm of personality clashes, the atmosphere subsides, and the three men are seen not so much as three separate individuals with their own follies, but as a brotherhood of man.
At this point, director Luke Joslin comes in, creating a standout moment, especially when the three actors share their stories of paternal abandonment. Of what success truly means. Of how they want to show up in life differently, even through the storms.
What The Shark Is Broken actually seeks to teach us has a deeper meaning. Perhaps for playwright Ian Shaw (real-life son of Robert Shaw), a broken shark represents a certain inner darkness that has the potential to befall us. One that has the possibility to arrive when we least expect it, if we choose not to face it head-on.
The Shark is Broken is presented by Storeyboard Entertainment in association with Stoddart Entertainment Group. It runs to 7 November in Melbourne at the Athenaeum Theatre. 188 Collins Street Melbourne Vic 3000.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://sharkisbroken.com.au/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/sharkisbrokenau/
Photo credits: David Hooley
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