Jaws made us scared to enter the water. This play reveals the real horror

Steven Spielberg was only 27 when he directed Jaws , but the film redefined the creature feature the same way his E.T. later made aliens cuddly and Jurassic Park rekindled our love of dinosaurs. Those movies dazzled viewers by pushing the limits of technology, but Jaws was most notable for what it didn’t show. The shark at its centre was a mess.

The 1200-kilogram leviathan’s mechanical malfunctions were notorious. Spielberg insisted on filming in open water, and the behemoth’s behaviour in the brine was so poor that the director had to invent a slew of film techniques covering up for the absence.

Those menacing point-of-view shots of swimmers’ legs? The victims yanked beneath the waves by an invisible terror? The two notes signalling the shark’s approach? They’re why the film is so chilling, despite how rarely we glimpse the misbehaving animatronic monstrosity the crew affectionately dubbed Bruce.

The Shark is Broken is a play that dramatises the production’s off-screen challenges, as experienced by the fractious, larger-than-life personalities of its three leads. There’s Richard Dreyfuss, the New Hollywood young buck desperate to prove his chops. Roy Scheider is the perma-tanned hot-shot fresh off Oscar-bait such as Klute and The French Connection . And then there’s the legendary Robert Shaw, the British actor who’d played everything from Bond villain to Henry VIII.

The shark in Jaws is what literary types call a structuring absence: you don’t see much of the big fish, but its presence looms large. The structuring absence of The Shark is Broken might well be Robert Shaw himself. The play is the brainchild of his son, actor and writer Ian Shaw. Writing a play about his father – and sometimes playing the role – meant grappling with the man who died of a heart attack when his son was only eight.

For most of his career, Ian avoided mention of his famous father. Nepo babies in showbiz are nothing new – even Aeschylus and Euripides had kids who followed in their footsteps – but the younger Shaw had built his career on his own terms long before The Shark is Broken was a glimmer in his eye.

That seed was planted after he met Richard Dreyfuss in Birmingham. The veteran actor was directing a production of Hamlet when Ian introduced himself as the son of his Jaws co-star. The meeting didn’t go well. “He looked like he’d seen the ghost of Hamlet’s father and sort of crumpled and sat down. I thought: ‘Well, I’ve blown this.’”

The younger Shaw had forgotten the lessons he had absorbed from Carl Gottlieb’s famous book The Jaws Log , which describes a volatile off-screen relationship between Dreyfuss and Ian’s father during filming. The rivalry among the Jaws cast was long a sore point for Dreyfuss, who claims that reports of his bratty behaviour are overblown. He and the playwright met again at the US premiere of The Shark is Broken.

Ian Shaw recalled: “I’d loved the film so much and watched it so many times, and the chemistry was so good that I sort of assumed that they were basically friends.