Several years ago, the British actor Ian Shaw looked in the mirror and saw the face of Quint, the grizzled, Ahab-esque shark hunter from Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.” Shaw had grown a Quint-like mustache for a role, but, more to the point, he’d reached roughly the age at which his father, Robert Shaw, had played Quint in the movie: “I thought, I really look like my dad when he was in ‘Jaws’!” In the nineties, in Birmingham, the younger Shaw had auditioned for a production of “Hamlet” directed by Richard Dreyfuss, and excitedly told him that he was the son of Dreyfuss’s “Jaws” co-star. Instead of embracing him, Shaw recalled, Dreyfuss looked “like I’d punched him in the stomach.”
These twin events inspired Shaw to retrace the steps of his father’s most famous role. By the time Robert Shaw played Quint, he had received an Oscar nomination for “A Man for All Seasons” and appeared in “From Russia with Love” and “The Sting.” A voracious drinker, he was often cast as macho men and heavies, but he was an affectionate dad, Ian said. He had ten children with three wives, including a stepson; Ian is the ninth, and the only one to become an actor. His father died in 1978, when Ian was eight. His renewed interest in “Jaws” resulted in a behind-the-scenes play, “The Shark Is Broken,” which Shaw wrote with Joseph Nixon. It premièred at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in 2019, then played the West End. It begins previews this week on Broadway, at the Golden Theatre, where Shaw’s mother, the actress Mary Ure, once starred in “Look Back in Anger.” Alex Brightman and Colin Donnell play Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider, respectively. Ian Shaw plays his father.
Shaw fils, at fifty-three, is a gentler soul than Shaw père. “I’m not fearless and so, well, alpha male. But I’m honest, which is what he was, I think. And it felt fearless to attempt this,” he said, of the play. It was early morning, before a rehearsal, and Shaw, having grown muttonchops to go with his Quint mustache, was aboard the Wavertree, an 1885 cargo ship moored at the South Street Seaport. An aide from the Seaport Museum, which maintains the vessel, showed him into the crew’s quarters. Shaw felt the floor rock. “We’re doing some movement in the play, and it’s very nice to feel this slight unsteadiness,” he said. Growing up in Ireland, he would take a ferry to and from boarding school in England. “That was just a nightmare, because I was so seasick,” he went on. He had just scotched an outing to Rockaway Beach, after his driver told him about a recent spate of shark sightings.
He sat in the captain’s saloon, where an antique map of New York Bay lay unfurled on a table. When he was five, in 1974, he visited his father on the set of “Jaws,” on Martha’s Vineyard. He remembers meeting one of the three mechanical sharks (collectively nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer), which terrified him. He also met the twenty-seven-year-old director: “Looking back, I thought, He looks quite young to be telling my dad what to do.” Mostly, he remembers playing on the beach. “Film sets are just dull,” he admitted.
The “Jaws” set, however, was a legendary disaster. The fake sharks, which had been tested in a freshwater tank, malfunctioned in salt water. The shoot went more than a hundred days over schedule, and the crew nearly turned mutinous. Quint’s fishing boat, the Orca, sank. Shaw and Dreyfuss squabbled. “Robert, perhaps, was trying to school him, because he thought that Richard was a bit vain,” Shaw said. One day, his father was pouring a drink between takes and Dreyfuss hurled the glass through a porthole.
On days off, Robert flew to Bermuda and brought Ian, who was unaware that his father was trying to spread out his working days in the U.S., to avoid a tax penalty. Researching the play, he culled from books, documentaries, family stories, a fan site called the Daily Jaws, and even his father’s “drinking diary,” in which Robert recorded the booze he did—and didn’t—resist. “You see a portrait of someone who is really struggling to win a battle, but they’re losing,” Ian said.
The play builds toward the famous “U.S.S. Indianapolis” speech, in which Quint recounts undertaking a wartime mission to deliver the Hiroshima bomb and watching his shipmates get devoured by sharks. Robert wrote the final version of the speech, which was originally several pages long. His son delivers it onstage every night. “When I started, it felt like a huge responsibility,” he said. He studied his father’s performance closely: the way he removes his cap; his mordant laugh after growling, “No distress signal had been sent.” “It’s been in my blood for years, though,” the younger Shaw said. “Because I’ve always loved the film. If I wasn’t anything to do with Robert Shaw, I’d be a ‘Jaws’ fan anyway.” ♦
