‘On 15 October 1970, the West Gate Bridge let out a deep, ominous groan. Steel strained, an eerie pinging filled the air, and rust flakes rained down. In a matter of moments, the structure gave way, plunging 35 workers to their deaths. It was Australia’s worst industrial disaster,’ the West Gate Bridge Memorial notes in shockingly concise prose.
Every day, more than 205,000 vehicles cross Melbourne’s West Gate, a 2.5km bridge across the Yarra that connects the city’s western suburbs with the CBD. Fifty-five years after its partial collapse, it’s sadly likely that few who cross the bridge are aware that 35 men died to facilitate their daily commute.
Playwright Dennis McIntosh’s West Gate – a work ‘of remembrance and recognition’, in the words of Melbourne Theatre Company Artistic Director and CEO Anne-Louise Sarks – ensures the dead men and their stories will be remembered by a new generation.
West Gate review – quick links
A personal story
McIntosh was 11 years old when sections 10 and 11 of the bridge, weighing some 2000 tonnes, collapsed and fell onto lunching workers in their huts below. He remembers hearing it fall and seeing the plume of smoke that rose above Port Phillip Bay afterwards.
But the playwright’s personal connection to the West Gate Bridge predates the disaster. His father, DF McIntosh, had the same initials and surname as the bridge’s resident engineer. On several occasions, he mistakenly received letters meant for the engineer – replies to earlier correspondence expressing concerns about the bridge’s construction.
‘The rumours around the school and town at that time were that the bridge was going to fall. Then it did,’ McIntosh writes in his program notes. ‘I remember dad opening a letter and proclaiming, “There is something wrong with the bridge.” Hence the rumours were galvanised in my mind. Over the years I wondered what really happened.’
McIntosh’s years of pondering and his subsequent interviews with survivors of the collapse (18 men survived the disaster, many with serious injuries) and family members of those who died, as well as his scrutiny of the 1971 Royal Commission (called the day after the bridge fell by then-Premier of Victoria Sir Henry Bolte) into the bridge’s fatally flawed construction are distilled in West Gate, his second play.
A spartan production
The production is directed by Iain Sinclair. Like Sinclair’s earlier MTC production, 2019’s sparse and compelling A View from the Bridge, West Gate is a spartan work, stripped back to bare essentials. It also calls back many of the creative team from Sinclair’s earlier production, and features some of the same actors too.
For the play’s first half, the main set element is a monolithic and portentous upright central slab. Designed by Christina Smith, who is also costume designer, it represents one of the West Gate Bridge’s numerous vertical supports. This is augmented by Niklas Pajanti’s lighting rig, raised and lowered as needed and representing aspects of the bridge’s construction infrastructure. Flying sparks aid the illusion at requisite moments, aided by Kelly Ryall’s appropriately industrial and ambient sound design and evocative composition.
At the play’s halfway mark, direction, stagecraft and design elements combine masterfully when the bridge inevitably collapses – a genuinely shocking and powerful scene that reduced some audience members to tears.
The effect was slightly spoiled on opening night by scattered applause, presumably from people who thought the theatre’s plunge into screaming chaos and darkness – echoing the fatal fall of some of the bridge workers, who rode the falling slabs of reinforced concrete some 50 metres to the ground and oily water below – was a break for interval. No such respite came.
Script’s flaws detract from West Gate’s impact
While there’s much to admire in West Gate – McIntosh adroitly captures the Australian working class vernacular of the 1970s, and the central pairing of the avuncular Italian migrant welder Victor (Steve Bastoni) and cheeky ‘Ten Pound Pom’ Young Scrapper (Darcy Kent) is charmingly written and performed – the script’s flaws detract from the production’s impact.
The bridge’s design faults are established through verbal sparring between flinty senior engineer McAlister (Peter Houghton), his junior Cooper (Ben Walter) and construction head, Stevenson (Paul English), augmented by additional pushback from workers Vinny (Simon Maiden) and site steward and foreman, Pat (Rohan Nichol). Here, the script is convoluted.
Such scenes do eventually spell out the reasons for the bridge’s impending collapse but are heavy-handed and work against the production’s rising tension. (An earlier scene, as the workers assemble at the site, establishes some of the central characters and their personalities far more effectively and efficiently.)
Conversely, in the play’s second half, the script is frustratingly shallow – as are McIntosh’s characters throughout. West Gate’s only female character, the grieving widow Frankie, who lives in a home weighed down by rubble and ruin, is especially underwritten, though actor Daniela Farinacci does an enormous amount with the limited role.
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The union movement, emboldened by the Royal Commission’s findings, helped introduce sweeping and significant changes to Australian industrial relations and workplace safety following the disaster. However, in West Gate, the union actions once construction on the bridge eventually restarts are glossed over in the blink of an eye.
The play’s tackling of pernicious Australian racism is equally underwhelming. Instead of challenging such views in any meaningful way, West Gate takes the easy way out by playing for laughs. Consequently, we get a simplistic look of the merits of tea versus grappa, salami versus a meat pie, and the anti-fascist Italian folk song Bella Ciao versus Sons of the West (the team song of the Footscray Football Club, as the Western Bulldogs were then known), instead of a more rigorous and interrogative examination of the deep and sometimes painful fault lines separating ‘wogs’ and ‘Aussies’ in the early 1970s.
For a play that strives to eulogise the workers who died in the West Gate Bridge disaster, and which highlights the ‘utterly unnecessary’ (to quote the Royal Commission) business practices which led to their demise, this feels like a significant shortcoming.
