Peter Mullan's return to the stage is a one-off: 'I can't afford it'

When Peter Mullan steps on stage as legendary football manager Bill Shankly on Friday night, it will be for the first time in more than 30 years.

Red or Dead is an adaptation of the 2013 David Peace novel of the same name, a fictionalised account of Shankly's glory years with Liverpool Football Club, and the period post-retirement when he lived in the shadow of his own success.

There's a statue to Shankly outside Liverpool's Anfield Stadium, and a city full of fans who know his name is part of their history - but that's not what's worrying Peter Mullan.

"There's 52 of us on stage," he says.

"It's not all about Shankly, it's about the city of Liverpool and the people.

"The biggest pressure is that the play is faithful to the spirit of the book. It's an intelligent, unashamedly exploration of football. It's much closer to Brecht or Shakespeare than the usual football biographies."

Philip Breen, who is responsible for the adaptation, first approached Mullan a number of years ago about an eight-hour passion play he envisaged with a community chorus.

The pandemic intervened and put his plans on hold, but a chance meeting with David Peace in his adopted city of Tokyo encouraged Breen to focus on the book.

The community chorus was revived and Les Dennis, Gordon Kennedy, Allison McKenzie, George Jones and Keith Fleming were cast. But despite being a huge football fan, and a former youth player, Peter Mullan was unconvinced.

"It was a project I really wanted to do but trying to find the time to afford to be able to do it was hard. Financially, how anyone survives in theatre is beyond me."

The wages in subsidised theatre weren't the only difference. In film and TV he says he would learn lines day by day, whereas this required committing the whole script to memory, and developing Shankly's distinctive voice.

" Vocally, we're similar," he says.

"We have that same timbre but I've had to work on the way he speaks."

That involved watching countless videos and recordings of Shankly, one of the first football managers to understand the power of the media, and use it to his advantage.

At 65, Mullan is older than Shankly was when he retired from football, a key moment in the play.

"I'm probably about five or six years too old for the part but in theatre there's more license. I think in a TV or film version, I think they might cast someone else because I don't look like him, but I sound like him."

Born in Peterhead and raised in the Mosspark area of Glasgow, close to the Govan shipyards, Mullan enjoyed football as a teenager. A goalkeeper and then a midfielder, he tried out for Manchester United where he learned the life lesson that he was "good but not good enough".

He left football behind to study at the University of Glasgow.

He appeared in a number of stage shows including The Trick is to Keep Breathing at the Tron Theatre in 1995 which was to be the last live theatre performance he would give.

After that came roles in Braveheart, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. He was the toast of European film festivals like Venice and Cannes, where he won accolades as a director and an actor.

He's one of the most recognisable faces on television, playing gritty hard men in Top of the Lake, and The Fixer, a shy romantic lead in the BBC sitcom Mum and a dwarf king in Amazon Prime's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

More recently he's been seen in Ozark, The North Water and After the Party.

Which explains why, despite the low wages, he's enjoying a break from the industry.

"You're completely infantilised in film and TV. You don't make your way to work in the morning, you get a note saying someone will pick you up. Then you go to work and you're taken to a caravan and they ask what you want for breakfast and then they bring you a cup of tea.

"Then you go to makeup and costume and then you're escorted onto a set and then you do your acting and then it all happens in reverse."

He seems happy to make his own tea, strolling into the rehearsal rooms and getting down to work with the rest of the cast, many of whom are also veterans of the screen (Allison McKenzie who plays his wife Ness was a regular in River City, and had a key role in Line of Duty).

"After 30 years, I've genuinely forgotten how long you get to rehearse, and how long the working day is. I keep asking the young team, is this normal?"

Normal, hard-working and humorous are all traits he shares with Shankly who transformed Liverpool from a second division club into a winning team.

Which takes us back to the book, Red or Dead, a dense and detailed novel as much about fanaticism as football.

"It doesn't demand that you know football. It demands your understanding that he is a fanatic and in order to understand him, you have to understand what he's fanatical about, and in understanding that you understand the world that he was in."

It's a world which no longer exists, and only one of those original passionate working-class player managers is still alive.

"Bill Shankly, Matt Busby, and Jock Stein – those three kings of football - they paid a price for that. One doesn't want to romanticise it too much. Is it admirable, is it healthy, is it fanaticism?

"There's Alex Ferguson, who has lived to a ripe old age, but he's in the same camp. The last of those committed, nothing-else-but-football managers. They live and breathe it."

He says he's delighted to be performing at the Royal Court, where audiences can tuck into a bowl of scouse in the auditorium before many of the shows. He says he's been told it compares with the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow.

"They let you know if they're getting bored. It's not bourgeois polite and that appeals to me."

And he hopes it will appeal to fans of all football teams, and none.

"That's going to be the big test. My kids have a passing acquaintance. My boy is into football but my girls are not massively into it so it will be fascinating to see how they relate to it."

And given his views on the low wages of subsidised theatre, and the fact that his family are coming to Liverpool to see the show, can we assume he won't be treading the boards again soon?

"No, it's a one-off for me. I can't afford it. The show might tour but with a 52-strong cast, I'm not sure if anyone can afford it."

Red or Dead is at Liverpool's Royal Court from March 21st until April 19th.