David Adamson has a chunk taken out of him by this claustrophobic three (and a half) hander
Most of us have at some point sat around a table and done a decent passing impression of our dad.
But then again my dad isn’t known as an all-time Bond villain or the speaker of some of cinema’s most famous lines. I don’t know about yours.
In The Shark is Broken, Ian Shaw takes the thespian adage of ‘the role I was born to play’ to its extreme and assumes the role of his father, Robert Shaw, as the Oscar-nominated, writerly-minded and whiskey-soaked actor condescends to a “thriller” directed by some kid called Steven Spielberg.
As any annual Oscar race will show you, actors talking about acting is one of the most insufferable things on earth. The soul-searching, the suffering, the craft. But this production quickly sets the absurdity of that job aside, then delves below the surface to look straight in the eye something as scary as any great white; fathers and their sons.
Shaw - with naturally an almost holographic likeness to his father - is joined in similarly uncanny form by Dan Fredenburgh as Roy Schneider and Ashley Margolis as Richard Dreyfuss in completing that famous trio of cinema; traumatised shark hunter Quint, police chief Brody and marine biologist Hooper.
Much of the initial substance of this piece comes from two things; the casting and the set. The rendering in both appearance and performance of these real people manages to swerve a lot of the clanging nods and winks you can get from actors playing famous actors. Not all the nods and winks are avoided - for instance, Dreyfuss’ mention of his next movie being ‘about aliens’ - but the actors are presented as people with pasts and insecurities rather than that guy from The French Connection.
The set design by Duncan Henderson is simply excellent, a brilliant use of a centrepiece in staging that feels both feet away from offstage goingson and as remote and claustrophobic as a wood cabin. The small details of actors having their civilian possessions (and alcohol) stashed around the set we’re all so familiar with speaks to a world many of us never enter. This, but without being, as they say, ‘too in’.
Chamber pieces like this can go two ways; you sit in a room with three strangers for an hour and a half and leave feeling like you’ve glimpsed something of the human condition, or you leave exhausted, chock-full of Haribo, feeling like you’ve done a three nights in Guantanamo.
There is of course the potential for a dangerous precedent being set here; staging a play about the making of a film. What cinematic classic should next be laid out on the slab? A three-act about Marlon Brando turning up to Apocalypse Now looking like a thumb and nearly tanking the whole thing? Robert De Niro’s pre-Raging Bull bulking tour of Italy? Daniel Day Lewis’ self-imposed exile as a shoemaker in Florence?
The crux to the success of The Shark is Broken is that - like Jaws isn’t about the shark - it’s not really about the film at all. The masculinity of ‘70s Men’, the sense of certainty that was sold as their god-given right but can evaporate like mist on the sea, the ghost of the boy still haunting the man; much like ‘The Fish’, the terror lies largely unseen, just below the surface, and you don’t know it’s there until its teeth are in you.
The Shark is Broken is at The Lowry Theatre until Saturday 8 February, after which it tours the UK and Ireland.
Click here for tickets to The Lowry.
Click here for further information on the tour.
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