‘Peter Mullan’s exemplary performance as the driven and dogged Shankly is captivating throughout.’
‘Red or Dead’, based on the novel by David Peace and adapted for the stage by Phillip Breen, is a story about Bill Shankly and his impact not only on Liverpool Football Club, but on Liverpool itself. Of the cast (a staggering 52), the majority are not professional actors, but members of the theatre’s Community Choir, giving greater weight and realism to Shankly’s enduring importance to both club and city.
This is a play which takes a ‘slice of life’ to the extreme, with the substantial running time (somewhere around the 2 hours 20 mark) covering a whopping 22 years of Shankly’s life and career as manager of LFC. This is a fictional account, but there’s no particular exaggeration for dramatic effect to speak of. This is not to say it dragged – with the exception of a few slower sections, Peter Mullan’s exemplary performance as the driven and dogged Shankly is captivating throughout. It’s worth seeing this show just to watch the contrast between his first and second act performances – in the former, he conveys power and passion entirely by voice without excessive facial expressions or deviation from ramrod-straight posture; in the latter, he introduces a stammering uncertainty to his speech and adopts a bewildered, lost stage presence. Whoever takes the role of Shankly after Mullan will have some fairly enormous shoes to fill (as, I suppose, must likely have been said of Shankly himself).
The play’s chorus showcase by turn enthusiastic supporters at Anfield and the demanding masses, blend fluidly into and out of the LFC team and board members, and vocally and physically assist with scene changes (this is not nearly the sum of everything they do – it’s truly impressive). Max Jones’ sparse set stands as everything from the Shanklys’ home in West Derby to the LFC changing rooms at Anfield – and, to be fair, not all that much in between. The lack of visual difference between scenes exposes Shankly’s inability to split his life between work and not-work – his wife Ness (played – and sung – by Allison McKenzie) frequently stands silently to the side rear of the stage while Shankly opines, encourages, and manages: certainly this shows her as a loving and constant source of support throughout his life, but equally she is, very often, in the background.
The show’s music (arranged by Paddy Cunneen) echoes the set’s sparseness: with the exception of a brief serenade from Cilla Black (a fun turn by Jhanaica van Mook), all singing, mainly in the form of football chants and Scottish ballads, was tuneful but bare: there were no harmonies, and occasionally almost a discordance with the instruments. While this is surely an homage to the full-voiced football chants heard at every stadium, the powerful unison of voices also emphasises the intensity of feeling towards Shankly, towards LFC, and towards Liverpool – throughout the play, it’s hard to tell where one feeling ends and the other begins. This intensity is furthered by the script’s wording, with nearly every line containing some sort of “Repetition, repetition, repetition”, as Ness says (repeatedly). It’s an enormously effective device: we the audience feel the weight on Shankly’s shoulders, his appreciation of the fans that hold him in such esteem, the unpayable debt he seems to feel himself in, the unending attempts to improve, to win, to repay. As Shankly, Mullan says, “You play for every man, so you are every man” – this sense of oneness was palpable in the auditorium by the time ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ closed out the show, with the chorus of Liverpudlians helping to bridge that gap between cast and audience, between player and fan, between football and city.
‘Red or Dead’ runs at Liverpool’s Royal Court until April 19th, tickets are available here.