Daaa-dum. Daaa-dum...This play begins with the two most foreboding musical notes in cinema. They now evoke nostalgia as much they did terror when Jaws premiered in 1975.

Granted, the screeching violins in Hitchcock’s thriller are also instantly transporting. But the characters in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws are better company. In this highly entertaining three-hander we are in the company of Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Sheider, the stars who played sea dog Quint, marine scientist Hooper and the principled police chief Brody.

Co-written by Joseph Nixon and Ian Shaw, Robert’s son, this behind the scenes three-hander lifts the lid on the mythical tensions between the three actors during the weeks-long delay to filming. This was caused by the breakdown of the film’s biggest star. No, not the normal kind caused by a cocktail of ego and alcohol-fuelled emotional turmoil that Hollywood is used to, but the mechanical kind that kept the shark—named Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer — out of the water for more time than it was in.

Guy Masterson’s production gives us a seat at the galley table of the Orca, Quint’s shark-fishing vessel about which Brody famously said after glimpsing the great white: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

This claustrophobic space in which the actors wait to be told that Spielberg is at last ready to shoot another scene is set within an infinity of sea and sky (video design Nina Dunn). Clouds scoot across the expanse as conversation and conflict between the three actors ebbs and flows.

The clash is between the Jewish Dreyfuss (Liam Murray) and Shaw’s hard-drinking thespian, played by the star’s son Ian who looks so uncannily like his father his mere presence lends the evening authenticity. Demetri Goritsas is the even-tempered Schneider, who is much more interested in reading the paper than he is in squaring up to his co-stars.

It is Murray’s Dreyfuss who is the most provocative in the trio. While surrounded by water his New York Jewish angst is never far below the surface. Jews are not meant to be on the wet stuff he declares, his discomfort accentuated by Spielberg’s decision to shoot the film off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard instead of in a studio tank. When it is pointed out that Jesus walked across water happily enough Dreyfuss replies “And look what happened to him?”

But it is the self obsession of Dreyfuss’s “process” that mostly rubs Shaw’s old campaigner up the wrong way. The younger actor is wracked with self-doubt about his talent, while Shaw is anchored by years of touring Shakespeare in English provincial towns. In that sense the play is as much about the changing of the guard between two different types of film star.

Another example of this would be Sheider’s next film Marathon Man in which the Jewish/English Old-school dynamic of Dreyfuss and Shaw was replicated by the young Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier.

If Shaw the younger ever wanted to write a sequel to his terrific Jaws play he could do worse than looking to that movie for inspiration. And on the evidence of his Shaw, he’d make a convincing Olivier.