And then we went to the theatre…
(The ‘we’ here is my high-school friend Mathew and I, going to see theatre in question: The Shark is Broken in Toronto. I had flown across the country to see it. Mathew drove in from Hamilton. AND… OUR mutual childhood friend Demetri was co-starring as Roy Scheider - he of Jaws fame… the play being about the behind the scenes personality clashes during the shooting of Jaws. The play was written by Rober Shaw’s son Ian… who stars as his father in the play. The third actor, Liam, plays a young Richard Dreyfuss. The show was transplanted from a successful run in London’s West End nine months prior. Now you are all caught up on ‘the story so far…’)
The play charitably opens with an extended scene between Dreyfuss and Scheider. I suppose this kind of builds anticipation for Shaw’s (the actor and character and son and father) entrance - though layers of this will be lost should there ever be a production without Ian Shaw. But it also allows the audience some time to experience two talented actors working in tandem with great intertwined chemistry before you are subjected to the spectacle to follow.
In those five or so minutes I went on a journey. It was not unexpected. I’d been anticipating it for months - years by some measure. In those years the moment had gained layers of significance that I could not have anticipated back when Demetri told me about getting cast, back when we were riding the train from Bloomsbury to Beckenham on the first outing of our musical odyssey to a quilt of London locations that represented significant points in the map of the history of the music that we grew up loving together (but that is a story for another time).
So many of the layers that had built up had been laid by the silty accumulation of all that has been lost in the Covid pandemic. It was as though nearly three years of confinement and distancing and chaos culminated in those few minutes on stage. It was undoubtedly more significance than the play itself could fairly bear, nor was it a depth of meaning that was present for anyone else in the theatre - even my seat-mate.
From the bookend of being told about the show only barely pre-pandemic through to the closure represented by the freedom to frivolously go across the country to see a play in a room full of people; with the added baggage that the last time I saw a show with that many people, it was likely how I myself caught Covid; to the synchrony that Station Eleven - which hit me so firmly in the feels during the pandemic that I read it twice and watched the TV series - starts in a theatre in Toronto (not the same one, FWIW); and another connection I’m not at liberty to include.
I found myself on the precipice of tears in those opening moments. I didn’t cry. But I suspect I didn’t only because I’d already imagined that moment so many times that it would have required an entirely unexpected epiphany for me to be pushed to that level of emotion.
Then Ian Shaw came on stage. The play changed. It was here that it became very meta and simultaneously convoluted and it is the danger of the production that that IS the show. Ian Shaw’s performance is remarkable and complex. He is a human time machine, bringing his father back from the dead. We watch a man on stage, likely living the first line of his obituary. It's the show’s inarguable centre, and likely its greatest liability. I will likely never see the likes of it again, and that is its draw - at least so long as Shaw plays Shaw.
I find it hard to watch Demetri anywhere. I always see him - as opposed to the character. It’s the failing of a position of privilege and not in any way an indictment of his abilities as an actor. We have simply known each other, and performed with each other, for far far too long for it to be any other way.
Sometimes he reaches a state closer to the threshold of my willing disbelief. His performance in Snowden, for example. I don’t really know why.
With theatre in general I feel I have a programmed perception of all players as being less ‘real’ than in film. I suppose it is due to being in the same physical space as the actors without a window of reality dividing us. The ‘captured in amber’ medium of film, with its real and/or real-feeling sets assists me in feeling as though life was caught in situ as opposed to the collective experience of stage, where the fiction is a construct shared by all in attendance and on stage. I am willing to embrace that accepted artifice of stage as artifice than the implicit document of film.
….and here The Shark is Broken uniquely breaks my rule.
Robert Shaw appears before us, transported from the summer of 1974 to 2022. He walks across the stage recreating the behind-the-scenes drama of his most iconic performance. And it is wondrous and unsettling and impossible.
The performance sets the two actors on stage with him to an insurmountable task - lacking the genetic advantage of their co-star. So long as he does his job, there is nothing they can do to match him. If they gave the performance of a lifetime and he phoned in his, perhaps the field wouldn’t be so slanted. (One has to hope that this futility is in fact, freeing to Demetri and Liam. Knowing Demetri as I do, I expect so. My brief experience of Liam suggests he has the humility to have embraced the same.)
My brain - the audience brain - can’t fully compute what is going on. The clash between the uncanny within the manufacture of theatre is a unique experience that the mind can’t quite make complete sense of. We know this is not Robert Shaw, more than 40 years dead, yet we also understand that this is more than a simple master class in acting.
On top lies the additional meta-layer as Ian Shaw, the playwright, has a relationship-conversation across time with his father, through his father, in his father’s voice - and his father talks of his father, the grand-father to Dreyfuss and Scheider. The snake gobbles down upon itself in a tangled love-letter to a man and a film that feels as unreachable in meaning as the paradox of the ouroboros.
Its a mind fuck.
There must be a future production without Ian Shaw, at least to explore the possibility that there is more play than just spectacle here; to allow actors playing Dreyfuss and Scheider to act at par without baggage brought on stage for them alone to carry, whether they are willing or not, by the supernova that feels so inevitable and critically important to this theatrical experience that is Shaw as Shaw.
There is not a lot of plot. This is a fine theatrical tradition of dialogue and ideas that has lasted for generations. Three men, stuck on a boat for weeks. They clash. They face demons. They come to terms. We laugh along the way. It is enough.
I can’t help but wonder if it is enough with an entirely different cast. Clearly - I may have beaten that horse a bit much by now.
I wonder if there is an alternate reality where the play embraces the absurdist natures of theatre that the script is already banging up against. There are shades of No Exit here. Hell is other people. Life is interminable - it’s Godot on a boat. The film is never done - at least not on stage, we of course know that the film changes Hollywood. We end with three actors still waiting for that bloody shark. But in our reality - Shaw’s reality - the film wraps. How I would end it hardly matters, because this version is glorious.
