The Shark Is Broken

The son on the boat

Ian Shaw was born in London on 18 December 1969, the son of the actor Robert Shaw and the actress Mary Ure. He read American Studies at Sussex University before training at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, made his television debut in Casualty in 1993, and built an ordinary jobbing career either side of the Atlantic: the films Century (1993), Moondance (1995), The Boys From County Clare (2003), The Contract (2006) and Johnny English Reborn (2011), and television including EastEnders, The Bill, Sharpe and Silent Witness.

He was also, as a small boy, on Martha's Vineyard while his father played Quint. The play that made his name as a writer came out of a document rather than a memory: Robert Shaw's drinking diary, a private account kept during the shoot. Working with the writer Joseph Nixon, Shaw built the text from the diary, from television interviews the three leads gave while promoting the film, and from the recollections of others who had been on the water.

The premise is the historical fact that the mechanical shark did not work. With Bruce out of action and the schedule sliding from days into weeks, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are stuck on the Orca with nothing to do but drink, argue, play cards and talk. The USS Indianapolis speech is assembled in front of the audience.

Brighton, Edinburgh, and a run interrupted

The Shark Is Broken opened at the Rialto Theatre in Brighton on 24 July 2019 and went straight to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, playing Assembly George Square Studios from 2 to 25 August 2019. Guy Masterson directed, with Shaw as his father, Liam Murray Scott as Dreyfuss and Duncan Henderson as Scheider — Henderson doubling as the designer whose scaled Orca has followed the play everywhere since.

A West End transfer was set for May 2020 at the Ambassadors Theatre and lost to the pandemic. Performances finally began on 9 October 2021, with Shaw and Murray Scott returning and Demetri Goritsas taking over as Scheider. Booking was extended past the announced January close to 13 February 2022, and the production recouped its capitalisation on 11 February 2022 — an unusual result for a straight play in a market still recovering. It was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play.

Toronto and Broadway

The North American premiere ran at Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre from 25 September to 6 November 2022 with the London company intact. Broadway followed: previews from 25 July 2023 at the John Golden Theatre, opening 10 August, closing 19 November. Shaw again played his father, with Alex Brightman as Dreyfuss and Colin Donnell as Scheider.

New York was the least kind of the three cities. The reviews were respectful rather than enthusiastic, and although Duncan Henderson and Nina Dunn of PixelLux were ruled jointly eligible in Best Scenic Design of a Play, the production was among the shows shut out entirely when the 2024 Tony nominations were announced. What the run did establish was the title's reach beyond theatre audiences — a Jaws property that could be sold to people who had never booked a play.

The tour and the recording

A UK and Ireland tour opened at the Oxford Playhouse on 23 January 2025 and played a further fourteen venues — Malvern, Salford, Richmond, Nottingham, Bath, Canterbury, Newcastle, Guildford, Plymouth, Brighton, Cheltenham, Poole, Birmingham — before finishing with a week at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin to 17 May 2025. Shaw was joined by Dan Fredenburgh as Scheider and Ashley Margolis as Dreyfuss.

Reviewing the Lowry week in February 2025, David Adamson for Confidentials argued the piece works as a character study rather than a set of impressions, reading it as a play about the masculinity of 1970s men and the certainty that evaporates on them — and credited the cast with playing people with pasts rather than famous faces.

The tour was also filmed, at the Lighthouse in Poole, and the capture went up on BroadwayHD on 16 October 2025. That release matters to the play's afterlife: it is now the reference performance for anyone staging it, with the co-author's own reading of the part permanently available.

Where it stands in 2026

Shaw has stepped back from performing it and the play has become a licensed fixture, which is why it is on sale in dozens of places at once rather than touring as one company. In the United States alone, Ensemble Theatre Company played it at the New Vic in Santa Barbara to 22 February 2026, directed by Pesha Rudnick with Gildart Jackson, Will Block and Adam Poole; the same production moved to the Laguna Playhouse through 22 March. The Fulton Theatre ran it from 27 February to 22 March, Jobsite Theater at the Straz Center's Shimberg Playhouse in Tampa from 12 March to 5 April under David Jenkins, the Youngstown Playhouse from 19 to 28 June, Actors' Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables to 9 August with Iain Batchelor as Shaw, and Amphibian Stage in Fort Worth from 22 July to 16 August.

The current production of note is Australian: Luke Joslin's staging at the Foundry Theatre in Pyrmont, Sydney, running 28 August to 11 October 2026, with Anthony Gooley as Shaw, Robin Goldsworthy as Dreyfuss and Tom Stokes as Scheider. Beyond that the calendar thins until the new year, with Boise Little Theater booked for 15–30 January 2027, the D'Youville Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo for 30 April to 20 May 2027 and Memphis's Circuit Playhouse for 7–20 May 2027.

What critics are still arguing about

The performances are rarely the point of contention. Reviewers of the 2026 productions have been consistent about the three-hander working when the actors find what sits under the public personas — Jackson playing authority as a performance, Goldsworthy's restlessness as Dreyfuss, Gooley's brooding Shaw.

The disagreement is about the writing. Suzy Wrong, reviewing the Sydney production on 2 September 2026, called the play curiously surface-bound, trading in the signifiers of vulnerability without submitting to the discomfort of it. The Laguna review made a related structural objection: the script spends the evening mining the audience's foreknowledge for easy laughs, then asks that same knowledge to carry genuine grief. Defenders read it the other way — that the drinking and the trivia are the evasion, and the play is about three men on the last afternoon before their lives fork in directions none of them would choose.