In 2016, an adaptation of David Peace’s The Damned United was staged in Leeds and Derby where its pugnacious subject, Brian Clough, is still viewed as villain and hero respectively. Peace’s next football novel was Red or Dead, a 700-page opus about Liverpool FC’s eternally beloved manager Bill Shankly. It is similarly adapted on home turf: the Royal Court has laid out the red carpet, serving Shanks pies and Shanks pints, honouring the man who transformed the club.
The Damned United had a cast of 11 and was bulked out with human-size Subbuteo-style mannequins. Red or Dead assembles a whopping 52-strong ensemble who almost continuously fill the stage, adapter and director Phillip Breen evidently taking his cue from the anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone. In the lead role is film and TV star Peter Mullan, finally returning to the stage in a casting coup that gains resonance from a career as entwined with socialism as Shankly’s.
There are no spotlit soliloquies: Shankly is consistently accompanied by players, boot-room staff, board members or by his wife, Ness (Allison McKenzie), who is given more prominence than in the novel and beautifully sings Robert Burns’s poetry. Mostly it is the fans, so often sidelined in footballing dramas, who flock around him.
Peace’s novel is punctuated with poetic match reports, accompanied by a precise record of the thousands in attendance. It is an inspired move, then, to use a community company who switch from narrators to chorus to Kopites. They hang on Shankly’s words: when he calls chairman Tom Williams (Les Dennis, measuring out fatigue and frustration) to accept the job, leaving his post at Huddersfield in 1959, the ensemble draw close with pricked ears and bated breath. The play captures the sense of a life lived in the public eye, each move scrutinised.
Emphasising the all-consuming nature of the job, Max Jones’s spare set design serves as the Shanklys’ home, Anfield’s dressing rooms and boardroom, the training ground and occasionally the pitch – though match action is usually described not choreographed. After all, how could it compete with strikes such as Kenny Dalglish’s 1978 European cup winner – a clip of which is projected across the set to cheers from the audience. Peace’s novel finds Shankly returning to the kitchen table, strategising with cutlery – here those utensils are also used to recreate a match, ending with a knife stabbed in a block of butter.
Peace’s sentences are short. Short and repetitive. Repetitive and maddening at first. Maddening but with a momentum from the repetition. A momentum that is methodical. It’s representative of day-to-day training, game-by-game slog, the drive and stamina of Shankly. It becomes incantatory in the manner of Peace’s Red Riding quartet. But sharing the lines across a huge cast gives them colour and lightness, emphasising Shankly’s collectivism encapsulated by his belief that Liverpool was Liverpool’s best player, not one individual. Chants merge with pop songs, including Jhanaica van Mook singing as Cilla Black, and a group rendition of the Beatles’ She Loves You that bleeds into a match commentary, “yeah! yeah! yeah!” becoming a cry on the Kop.
In a fittingly unshowy performance, often still amid a whirl of movement, Mullan captures the manager’s rapid patter, warmth and no-nonsense approach, his voice switching from assertion to whisper in lines like “First is first, second is nowhere.” Some of Shankly’s witticisms don’t have the space to land, and while his Desert Island Discs appearance is recreated to sketch in some backstory, you miss his extended meeting of minds with Harold Wilson from the novel (although various political upheavals are pithily recorded). This Shankly can be inscrutable and the second half, which finds comedy in his inability to fully retire, needs a touch more tragedy. Still, it establishes a quietness that contrasts with the frantic first half. A coda deftly reflects on how fans have been priced out of the game.
The cast take on multiple roles including Kevin Keegan (Matthew Devlin in a fright wig), Brian Clough (a preening Paul Duckworth) and Ian St John (George Jones, capturing the player’s sense of betrayal when dropped). Dickon Tyrrell is excellent as Bob Paisley, Shankly’s deferential yet triumphant successor. Admirably ambitious, Breen’s production is both inspired and inspiring, told with the quick humour, community spirit and full force of the Kop.
At the Royal Court, Liverpool, until 19 April
