2,207 words, 12 minutes read time.
I’m a big fan of David Peace, the author whose novel of the same name this play is based. The Damned United, his fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s il-fated 44-day tenure at Leeds United (a day less than Liz’ Truss period as Prime Minister, as many journalist and online wags pointed when her disastrous period as Prime Minister ended), is the book he’s best known for. I loved it, and the film adaptation starring Steve Coogan, though much lighter in tone, was still a worthy effort. I also read his GB 1984, a novelisation of the miners’ strike written from the viewpoints of Messrs Scargill, Heathcliffe and McGahey. That’s pretty good too. Time prevented me from reading all of his Red Riding trilogy, set in Yorkshire during Peter Sutcliffe’s murderous rampage against girls and women. But what I read was good, and the television adaptation on Channel Four was a powerful, gritty, violent drama that’s well worth revisiting.
I purchased Red Or Dead, Peace’s second legendary football manager based novelisation, this time with the great Bill Shankly as its subject, almost as soon as it came out, hoping it would match or even exceed the Damned United.
It was a huge hardback tome of over seven hundred pages in length. I found it to be almost unreadable, and gave up on it about one-tenth in.
I wasn’t alone in my opinion, as a skim through the Amazon reviews makes clear, and for a book originally retailing at £20 plus to be available for £2.99 in The Works within a few months of publication is not a sign of success.
I could see what Peace was trying to do. He was attempting to demonstrate how Shankly’s success was based on repetition, on doing the same things over and over, ingraining good habits in mind and body until a state of perfection is reached, in the manner that a classical musician will repeat scales or certain musical pieces over and over until they can be performed on demand almost unconsciously. This was the methodology Shankly sought to instil in his players and the teams he managed, in the fifteen years he spent in charge at Liverpool FC, THE team he managed.
Peace’s attempt to mirror the Shankly method in a literary fashion was a bold, admirable idea. But page after page of ‘Bill Shankly goes into the kitchen and makes himself a cup of tea. The first cup of tea of the morning. Strong with a splash of milk. Two sugars. Stirred clockwise three times. Bill Shankly sits at the table and opens his notepad. Bill Shankly drinks his tea and looks at the notepad. The notepad with the team sheet for Liverpool’s game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield. Bill Shankly thinks about Ian St John. Ian St John who was injured in the match against Leeds United. Last Saturday. Away. At Elland Road. Bill Shankly thinks about Liverpool’s game next Wednesday. Against Real Madrid. In the first leg of the European Cup quarter-final. Away. In Madrid. Bill Shankly picks up a pencil. Bill Shankly writes a question mark next to Ian St John’s name. On the team sheet. The team sheet Bill Shankly had written. In the notepad. The team sheet for the game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield…’
And so on, and on, and on.
And on…
How can anyone make of such source material an entertaining play?
Such were my thoughts as I headed for the Royal Court theatre.
The Royal Court theatre in Liverpool.
The month-long run at the Royal marks the world premiere of the production, and the theatre was packed by the time the doors closed and the lights dimmed.
The audience tended towards the middle to upper age register, though with a smattering of younger men and women, with quite a few couples.
I’d guess that most of those in attendance were working class, likely to be long-term Liverpool FC supporters, and with many of them not being regular theatre goers, though maybe that’s too many assumptions.
As is my usual practice, I read no reviews beforehand and so genuinely had no idea of what to expect as the cast assembled on the minimalist, suitably vintage stage.
I’m happy to report that Philip Breen did a superb job in adapting such seemingly unpromising source material for the stage, demonstrating that not only could it be done, but that it could be done in such a manner that it has a genuinely populist appeal.
As narrated by the multi-talented Alison McKenzie, in the guise of Shankly’s beloved wife Ness, Peace’s words were revealed to possess a poetry that had failed to escape my notice as dry words on the page.
As well as narration, we get plenty of great dialogue too, sometimes in dramatic re-enactments of key moments in Shankly’s life and career, from before, during and after those momentous days at Liverpool FC, and sometimes in well-crafted interactions between Shankly and his players, coaching staff, groundsman, supporters, club chairman, fellow managers (including Clough), and Ness, all written and designed to illustrate the character and philosophy of life of the man.
There’s plenty of nostalgia to be had for those who lived and followed football in this period, with cameos from the likes of Kevin Keegan and Emlyn Hughes (with a sly did at the latter for being an irritating Tory), and there are also some genuinely heart tugging moments, such as when we are informed that the troubled club chairman Jimmy McInnes, who first brought Shankly to Liverpool from Huddersfield Town was found hanging under the Kop.
The play has a large cast of fifty-two, drawn, aside from the lead actors, from a local community theatre group, almost all of whom occupied the stage throughout the performance.
The size of the cast gives the play an appropriately democratic and collectivist style and form, with those who don’t have a speaking part still able to play an essential role as representatives of the Anfield crowd on match days, as well as being a rousing choir in the production’s several musical numbers.
The first rendition we get of the inevitable You’ll Never Walk Alone is at the point in the story when it was adopted as the club anthem by the Kop, one Saturday afternoon in 1963, as Merseybeat swept the nation and Gerry and the Pacemakers took this little remembered number from the musical Carousel to the top of the Hit Parade. The recreation of that moment began as a solo rendition by McKenzie, soon to be joined by the full cast. They in turn were augmented by the archived, echoic, full-throated surround-sound of the Kop itself, and not a small number of the audience, until it felt as though the whole theatre was shaking through sheer volume and raw emotion.
Musically, we also get She Loves You, again as a full-cast plus Kop number, and Cilla the Singer in full peak-Cilla dress and hair, standing alone in the spotlight on a raised platform at the back of the stage, giving us Anyone Who Had a Heart, as copied from Dionne Warwick.
This musical interlude, despite being beautifully performed by Jhanaica Van Mook, was one of the play’s few missteps. Every other musical component served to illustrate key moments in the story. This felt like pure cabaret, though audience reaction suggested that mine was a minority opinion.
Some more or less good natured audience hissing at the first mention of a defeat by Liverpool’s arch nemesis’ Manchester United early on, was beautifully undercut by Shankly movingly relaying the moment he learned of the tragic event of the Munich Air Crash of 1958, his words accompanied by symbolic snow falling onto the stage, of how he got down on his knees and prayed ‘harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything’ for the survival of his friend and fellow Scot, United’s manager Matt Busby.
As we know, Busby did survive, unlike twenty-three of his fellow passengers on that ill-starred and ill-advised return flight from Belgrade, including eight of his young team, the Busby Babes.
The close relationship between the two managers remains an important theme throughout the rest of the play.
After the interval, the performance resumes with archival newsreel footage of shocked, and often disbelieving, real-life Liverpudlians’ as they reacted to the news of Shankly’s retirement in 1974, one of several intelligent uses of ghostly period film projected onto the back of the stage.
This second half was a half-hour or so shorter than the first half. This made sense, given that life for Shankly after football would last a mere seven years, until his death at the relatively young age of sixty-seven.
But for Shankly, who was only half-joking when he famously said that ‘Football’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that,’ there could never really be a meaningful ‘Life after football.’
The difficulty that many working men, and Shankly never ceased to consider himself a ‘working man,’ have in finding meaning in life once the daily routine of work is over, is in and of itself a great topic for drama. But here, the great man’s failure to adjust to retirement was played a little too much for laughs, and this made the second half of the play weaker than the first, though that’s not to say it was weak per se, or that it significantly lowered my estimation of the whole.
For some considerable time after his decision to step down, Shankly continued to turn up at Liverpool’s training ground, to impart the benefits of his wisdom to players and staff, to ‘keep himself in shape’, to ‘help out’, to be around in case he was needed, but really just to be there because there was nowhere else that he needed to be.
In the end, it was politely requested that he stay away, because his presence was at risk of undermining new manager Bob Paisley, previously his long-term assistant, at a time when he needed to ‘make his mark’.
Soon, of course, he did indeed make his mark, building upon the essential foundations Shankly had laid to lead Liverpool to even greater heights, to add the European Cup, the one triumph that had alluded his predecessor, to the already impressively stocked Anfield trophy cabinet.
We do see all this in the play, but the over-concentration on the comedic in this second half downplayed the key, tragic essence of Shankly’s final years, an essence well encapsulated by the Ian St John in his remark that, ‘Shanks died of boredom, of not being the manager of Liverpool Football Club.’
That’s not to say, to paraphrase the cliche beloved of football commentators, that this was ‘play of two-halves’. The level of performance was never below excellent, and the comedy provided the audience with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.
Shankly believed footballing success was predicated on individuals working as one, as a collective towards a shared goal (or, more correctly, towards the opposing team’s goal). In one of his most iconic statements he described this as a form of socialism, ‘real socialism in action.’ He always recognised that the collective extended well beyond the eleven players on the pitch to incorporate everybody connected with the club, from the boardroom down to the supporters, with the players and the manager, those who most obviously receive the glory and the accolades of success, being but parts of a much greater whole.
Much the same, with appropriate linguistic amendments, can be said of a successful theatre production, and of much else in life.
Almost everything about this play serves to powerfully illustrate this truth.
This being said, it seems almost a contradiction to single out individuals for praise. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to mention Peter Mullan’s superb performance in the lead role, though perhaps we should expect nothing less from such an experienced and accomplished actor. He had Shankly’s mannerisms and accent down pat. But his performance never descended into mere impersonation, and although he is the ‘star’ name, there are no star moments, no grandstanding attempts to dominate. Clearly, he understands his subject and the nature of the production well.
Alison McKenzie, I’ve mentioned, but Les Dennis was so convincing as Tom Williams, who took over as the Liverpool club chairman after the suicide of McInnes, that ‘Les Dennis’ disappeared entirely and I didn’t even realise it was Les Dennis until I checked the cast list on the bus home.
Breen’s direction should also be commended. Two-and-a-half hours is a fair old length for a play, but never for a moment did it drag.
Some prior knowledge of the life and times of Bill Shankly would certainly enhance enjoyment of the production. But those who lack such knowledge would almost certainly leave the theatre wanting to rectify this deficiency.
I wouldn’t recommend that they head straight for Peace’s novel, although I left tempted to dig it out from the darkest, most neglected corner of my book collection.
Red Or Dead continues at the Royal Court, Liverpool until April 19th, but will surely be coming to a theatre near you at some point.
