It’s one thing for a director to call “action!”, and another to get it. All manner of things can go wrong, and in Jaws, Stephen Spielberg’s monstrously successful 1975 thriller, plenty did.

In this wryly funny, affectionate, twin-pronged tribute to the film that changed Hollywood and to its marvellous yet difficult star, the audience is anchored off the stern of the Orca, the decrepit boat in which actors Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss set out – as Police Chief Martin, the eccentric shark-hunter Quint and marine scientist Hooper – to locate and kill the great white shark that has been feasting on Amity Island locals in the lead-up to the 4 July holiday.

Mostly, however, the actors aren’t doing much at all. The film’s real star, “Bruce”, the animatronic shark, is repeatedly breaking down, leaving Scheider, Shaw and Dreyfuss little to do between takes except drink, smoke, sunbathe and bicker.

Anthony Gooley, Tom Stokes and Robin Goldsworthy in The Shark is Broken. Photo © David Hooley

As portrayed by writer Ian Shaw (son of Robert) and co-writer Joseph Nixon, Scheider (played here by Tom Stokes) is a steady, fact-obsessed peacemaker and Dreyfuss (Robin Goldsworthy) a neurotic newcomer. Shaw (Anthony Gooley) stands apart, a grandiloquent, hard-drinking veteran whose disdain for Hollywood – and Dreyfuss in particular – is unconcealed.

With their vices neatly apportioned and their personalities schematically opposed, there’s enough here to be amused by, particularly for anyone with a moderate knowledge of Jaws and the mythology of its notoriously troubled production.

Robert Shaw’s wrestling with the now iconic scene in which the three men compare scars provides a natural dramatic high point. Winking comments about Hollywood and the future (Scheider’s refusal to contemplate a sequel; Shaw’s incredulity at Spielberg’s planned UFO epic) rely on our considerable hindsight.

The Shark is Broken. Photo © David Hooley

The production’s technical achievement is notable. Designer James Browne’s Orca set (which sits within a wider apparatus of film-making) is imposing and meticulous. Video designer Cameron Smith’s wall-sized LED cyclorama creates an uncanny (even queasy-making) sense of the boat bobbing on open water. In one “immersive” moment, the lights are shut down and high-powered fans send a just-perceptible mist of water into the auditorium. Nice touch.

John Williams’ iconic score? Permission denied, perhaps, but composer Sean Peter’s riffing on it is evocative enough.

Robin Goldsworthy (as Richard Dreyfuss) in The Shark is Broken. Photo © David Hooley

Directed by Luke Joslin, the central performances are solid. Stokes captures Scheider’s angular presence and authoritative speech. Goldsworthy’s Dreyfuss is extremely well observed and funny. Shaw’s volatility is softened into something like gruffness in Gooley’s playing, and we don’t get a strong sense of the dangerous edge he brought to the role of Quint. But there’s a very good passage when Gooley’s own theatrical experience aligns with his character’s in a delivery of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state …”).

Not everything played for laughs. The play’s most affecting material is in its glimpses of the three actors’ lives and their complex inheritances – especially Shaw’s, whose alcoholic father took his own life when Robert was 12. But they remain below the surface for the most part in what amounts to an amiable, skilfully performed tribute to analogue Hollywood, built around something most in this show’s target audience knows and loves.

The Shark is Broken plays at The Foundry Theatre at The Star, Pyrmont Sydney until 11 October. 

It then plays the Athenaeum, Melbourne from 15 October.