Red or Dead

1. Chris Harvey - The Telegraph

It is August 1974. Bill Shankly leads out his FA Cup-winning Liverpool team for the Charity Shield at Wembley. He walks shoulder to shoulder with Brian Clough, the newly installed manager of league champions Leeds United. It’s a significant moment. One month earlier, Shankly had announced his retirement after 15 years at the Anfield club. One hour later, the showpiece game will degenerate into fist fights, with Liverpool striker Kevin Keegan and Leeds captain Billy Bremner both sent off, and storming down the tunnel shirtless.

In a rehearsal room in Liverpool, those events are being revisited, complete with a needling exchange between the two managers, and the dressing-room aftermath of the disgrace that marred Shankly’s big day. My Name Is Joe star Peter Mullan, dressed in a tee-shirt rather than Shankly’s grey suit, exerts emotional authority as the Scotsman. Les Dennis is narrating; RSC veteran Dickon Tyrrell, draped in an Everton scarf, delivers the lines of Shankly’s coach and replacement, Bob Paisley; and young Matthew Devlin captures Keegan’s distress at letting “the boss” down. A chorus of actors interjects with thunderous bursts of “Shankly!”

This is Red or Dead, the stage adaptation of David Peace’s monumental 750-page novel about Shankly’s years at the club. Peace, the author of The Damned United, about Clough’s ill-fated 44-day reign at Leeds, grew up in West Yorkshire and is a fan of Huddersfield Town, the club that Shankly was managing when Liverpool came knocking in 1959. The wiry, pugnacious Scot would bring his gospel of common sense and hard work to a club that was marooned in the second division and transform it, building a team to win promotion, then the first division title, three times, and the FA Cup, twice, plus, finally, a European trophy. Many believe that Shankly created the almost mythic vision of Liverpool Football Club that endures to this day; some say he gave it its soul. 

The staging grew from the germ of an idea that director Phillip Breen had after directing the York mystery plays with 150 community actors in York Minster in 2016. It changed his life, he tells me. He became determined to write a passion play for Liverpool. When he read Peace’s 2013 novel, Breen was so moved that he wrote a letter to the author in longhand, care of the publisher, that “your book is better than the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare put together”. (Breen, one should note, has been a home and away Liverpool supporter for three decades, though the Shankly era was already over by the time the 45-year-old was born.) Peace eventually emailed back, thanking him but noting that it was unlikely they would ever meet as he lived in Tokyo. Breen happened to be directing a production in Japan at the time. “It was a moment of total Kismet,” he says. They met, and Breen explained how the opening of the book – “In the winter-time, in the night-time, they remembered him” – reminded him of a spoken-word oratorio. He suggested “a passion of Bill Shankly, with a community chorus”. Peace agreed.

At 65, Mullan is four years older than Shankly was when he retired, but his fellow Scot’s partisan fervour and comic timing are native to him. Mullan grew up in Mosspark, south of the Govan shipyards in Glasgow, the seventh of eight children. Shankly was one of ten, born into a mining family in the small village of Glenbuck. He was a vivid personality, with the dry wit of a great comedian and an armoury of motivational tricks. One of his greatest signings, miner’s son Keegan, whom he bought from fourth division Scunthorpe United for £33,000 and paid £50 a week, described how Shankly prepared him for a test at West Ham against England’s former World Cup-winning captain. “He said, ‘Aye son, I’ve just seen that Bobby Moore. What a wreck. He’s got big bags under his eyes, he’s limping, he’s got dandruff… he’s been out to a nightclub again, son.’” Keegan went out and scored in the game yet had nothing but admiration for the defender’s performance. Shankly, he recalled, told him after the match, “Aye son, he’s some player that Bobby Moore, isn’t he? You’ll never play against anyone better than him.”

Embodying the Shankly voice, for Mullan, demanded intense commitment. “For hours upon hours of the day, I would listen to him and then go back to the script,” he tells me, over a mug of tea. “If I’m doing a film or TV, I learn the lines on the day, unless it’s a big speech… [but for this] I had to learn the script months before we’d begun.” He already had the raspiness, he says, but he had to go up a register from his own deep growl, and Shankly’s familiar terse speech patterns were idiosyncratic. “When Bill talks, and he believes in things, certain words he’ll elongate for no particular reason, other than to make his point.” He slips into character to enunciate the famous speech that Shankly made at Liverpool town hall to the tens of thousands of fans who had turned out to welcome the team home after the extra-time defeat to Arsenal in the 1971 FA Cup Final. “Since I came here,” he begins, “to Liverpool and to Anfield… I have drummed it into our players… time and again… that they are privileged… to play for you.”

Mullan grew up in a city even more divided by its two football giants. “In Glasgow in the 1960s, sadly even now, everybody was either a Celtic or a Rangers fan, divided along sectarian lines,” he says. He was brought up Catholic, so he supported Celtic. It was the era of Jock Stein’s great Celtic side, Scottish champions for nine successive seasons between 1966 and 1974, and the first British team to lift the European Cup, in 1967. The young Mullan was a footballer himself, first as a goalkeeper and later as a midfielder. “I was a good player,” he says. “I got a trial for Man United. That was a great day but it was a tough day, too, because I realised I’m good, but I’m not good enough.” It was our gain. He’s played some fierce hard men in his time. Is he really a big softy? “I’m neither,” he says, with a grin. “I’m not a big softy but I’m definitely not a hard guy.”

 As a film director, Mullan wrenched open the door of the scandal of Catholic Ireland’s cruel and inhumane mother and baby homes when he made The Magdalene Sisters in 2002. As an actor, he has left a trail of scorching performances, as a heroin dealer in Trainspotting, a feared town leader in Top of the Lake, and most recently as a teacher accused by his ex-wife of sexually abusing a teenager in Channel 4’s word-of-mouth hit After the Party, alongside real-life partner Robyn Malcolm. “I think it gets an audience because of Robyn’s performance – it’s so extraordinary, people go, ‘oh, you’ve got to see that’,” he insists. He’s also played comedy, opposite Lesley Manville in the much-loved BBC sitcom Mum, and fantasy – he was a dwarf king in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and a “Death Eater” and spy in Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows. 

Mullan’s youth coincided with the era of football hooliganism. For a period in his teens, he was part of a Cardonald razor gang called the Young Car-Ds, but he says, they didn’t get involved in football violence. Mullan was the only gang member who cared about the sport, though even he wavered. “When I was a bad boy for that year, the manager of the youth team came to my house a couple of times to say, why are you missing training? But I’d already decided that drink, drugs, fags and girls were preferable to football training.” He would walk away from gang life to study and go to university, where he first began acting. It was a fit from the start. He’s clearly in his element in a rehearsal room, telling stories, cracking jokes, just one of the lads (and lasses – Allison McKenzie plays Bill’s wife Ness, Jhanaica Van Mook is Cilla Black). There’s nothing starry about him. It’s not hard to see how actors like Kevin Spacey, whom he appeared with in Ordinary Decent Criminal attract his ire. “I didn’t like him at all,” he told an audience at a film festival talk in Lille last year. “Everything about him was fake, so he can play fake, because he is fake… It’s when he tries to act human, he struggles.”

Recently, he railed at what cosmetic surgery is doing to the acting industry. “There’s no doubt it’s dehumanising,” he tells me. “I have no issues at all with anyone who wants to do work to their face, that’s their business. I do have a big issue when whole media organisations have decided that they cannot cope with a human face.” He describes how Malcolm recently had to ask producers to pull publicity photographs of her that had been airbrushed, “She had to say, ‘Don’t try and make me look like I’m 40, because it’s absurd. I’m not. I’m 60.’ And that’s dangerous. It plays out the whole fascist trope of the master race, which is, we’re all f---ing perfect, aren’t we? And don't you want to look like you’re 21, when in actual fact you’re 70? What the f---ing hell is that? Where's the humanity?”

After directing three films, he is bleak about the industry’s future. “The lack of finance in independent cinema is scary. I think cinema, sadly, is dying at the moment. I don't know how long cinemas will stay open for, I really don't… The dividing line between cinema and television has become so fine now I think it is really struggling to compete. People have stopped going, particularly after Covid.” (He confesses that he has a 65in telly himself.) “Where people are going now en masse is concerts and paying through the nose to watch their musical idol on massive screens,” he adds. “I tried to buy AC/DC tickets for my 16-year-old – couldn’t f---ing get them, you know, and when was the last time they brought out a new album? But my 16-year-old and my 15-year-old grandson wanted to see them at Murrayfield.” (He has three grown-up children from his earlier marriage, and a daughter from his previous relationship.)

I wonder what Mullan thinks Bill Shankly would make of the intensely money-driven nature of modern football? “I think, like that whole generation, he would be baffled at the sheer numbers involved,” he says. “Nobody would have imagined 10 years ago, five years ago, players on half a million pound a week [as is paid to Manchester City’s Erling Haaland]. Personally, I have nothing against it, because a career has such a short lifespan, and the powers that be, they’re making a ton of money – they’re all getting rich on it. For me, the biggest heartbreak, and it’s quite central to this production, is that it’s outpriced the fans. That’s what angers me. People can’t afford to go in football now, and that’s so wrong. I was an arm’s length from Johan Cruyff, from [Celtic’s mercurial winger] Jimmy Johnstone, from George Best, Bobby Charlton, now you have to watch it on TV.”

Mullan is more overtly political than Shankly, leftist and sincere, “There’s no getting past the fact that these are genuinely scary times. You can’t be quiet in the face of it, and that’s regardless of political persuasions. You’re either a fascist or you’re not, and if you’re not, you need to fight it. I don’t remember it in my lifetime being as stark as that. I would never have imagined a time America would be siding with a dictator in Moscow, rather than ‘democratic’ Europe.” Shankly, Mullan says, brought with him a belief in the idea of teamwork that he referred to as “a kind of socialism”, yet the manager was essentially “old Labour” in his principles, he believes. “I think, like most of those old guys, they wouldn’t recognise the ‘blue Labour’ party of today.”

Breen notes that “so much of the thinking about socialism comes out of the university common room and is in many ways abstract. Shankly’s socialism comes from something very practical and very hard.” Breen sees its roots in those early years in Glenbuck, “eking out a living on the side of the hill”, and he sees a commonality in the three great Scottish managers of the era – Shankly, Stein and Sir Matt Busby, all born in pit villages within 25 miles of one another. Each had spent time down the mines themselves. “They bring a new approach to football based on a sense that by collective endeavour, we achieve more.”

“Shankly’s socialism would probably be closer to the Fabian notion of it,” Mullan says. “He wasn’t a militant. He thought you should be kind and fair to your fellow man. It’s very much influenced by Rabbi Burns. It’s certainly not Marxist. It’s a very straightforward, humanistic approach to life, and that’s how he believed a team should play. As he says, in the play, there should be no individuals, no star players, no celebrity footballers. That’s anathema to him. For Shankly, it’s all about the team. Some people pay lip service to that, but they don’t really mean it. He meant it.”

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2. Neil Atkinson - The Anfield Wrap

The story continues. The point is always the work, always the journey. It has to be future focused. For Liverpool, the substantial money is committed for what will come. For Mo Salah, there could have been more substantial money elsewhere in semi-retirement, but what's the point if the point isn't the work. In his words…

"I would like to say to (the fans), I am very, very happy to be here. I signed here because I believe we can win a lot of big trophies together."

And for us there is the journey: together, as the man says above. That you can have an argument about which was the most transformative signing of the early Jürgen Klopp era, when one of them has become Liverpool's third highest scorer, is telling how good that run of signings actually was. You can hold a candle for Sadio Mane or Virgil van Dijk or Alisson Becker. But the point at which Salah arrives is the point at which Liverpool's attack goes from good to great, and you can argue it has never ceased to be great since. Whatever is happening around the rest of the side they could just, say, put seven past Manchester United at home or Crystal Palace away. Salah has been a foundational stone we built on and he has to be that again, for what could prove to be his final Liverpool contract. It was important he stayed because it was important that foundational stone remained in place while we worked out how to build on it for the next thing, while still enjoying this thing.

This is the job for Richard Hughes and Arne Slot. Win now and make sure you can win then too. Salah helps with both - winning now is the best way to ensure you have the best chance for winning then as well, if you are a football club which needs to be self-sufficient. Winning now buys time to plan how to keep winning then. But winning now, having great players now, also provides the fuel for winning then. The accounts for 2023-24 tell that story. Liverpool without Champions League football would become nothing far too quickly. That's a brutal modern moment, but it contains the eternal truths of football; it is a constant process of building on what was, in order to be able to achieve what will come next tomorrow. And the purpose is for the shared moment in the present, the collection of more memories for our future pasts. That is what the game is at its heart.

Last night, I went to see Philip Breen's adaptation of Red Or Dead at the Royal Court. It is marvellous; a deeply generous work which honours Bill Shankly as the book did. For some, beyond issues some will always have with Peace's technique, the book ran into a core problem. Shankly was not complicated. Shankly was simple. What Peace wrote was a straightforward romance about a man who loved work and people, loved the game and loved the space where all that intersected. That it became tragic when that was removed was again perceived to be too uncomplicated. Where was the light and shade?

Simple is pushed against when we are taught complicated is important, complex is engaging. The world is complex and complicated. One man who is committed to his work, the people and a sense of good feels almost naive within it. But one person committed to collective generosity can make a profound difference when circumstances align. At the heart of Peace's initial text was the repetition of the attendance in full for every match. At the heart of Breen's adaptation is his Chorus, made up for 40 volunteers from the city region, who effectively act as both sounding board, setting and propulsive drive for Peter Mullan's Shankly, a propulsive drive which rightly ebbs at the moment the work stops. 

Breen's risk taking here in his scope and pacing shouldn't be lost in the context of Mullan's colossus. But Mullan's performance is just that; what Shankly called Ron Yeats. He doesn't do an impression of Shankly, a caricature. He embodies him in every particular and finds true depth in the role. It is a serious feat of work and then is in and of itself generous. This show, about the ultimate foundation, is much more than a work of nostalgia; early we see how Shankly wanted and needed things to be different, to be modern. It's an act of devotion, to its subject and its city, to its cast and its audience.

Mullan doesn't take a solo curtain call, instead staying with his people. Mullan knows, as Breen knows, as Peace knows, as Shankly knows, everything happens because of the togetherness. The collective work is the thing. Those of us lucky to work as part of a collective in a way which offers joy have to share that joy liberally. Ultimately, if the job is to make the people happy, then you have to make the people happy. It is a reminder that yesterday only truly matters insofar as what it allows you to do tomorrow. The work is everything when the work is a gift to you and a gift to others. The work is a gift when the work is shared joy, collective delight.

That is the shared line. This is what is foundational, and over, and over, and over again are our previous foundations built on. We will keep going and one day they will need to send an archaeologist from Mars to make sense of it all. More in than out? You better believe it, boyo. You are all in now. This is it, this is your life and this is ours and you have lashed yourself to our mast which is good news for you because we've got a fucking brilliant mast. Shankly built it.

And you've got goals to score on Sunday because we have a league title to win. We need you more than want you. We want you for all time. You wouldn't want it any other way. More in than out to this thing of ours.