The West Gate Bridge disaster looms large over Melbourne. A new play can’t fully capture its grief

Pia Johnson/Melbourne Theatre Company Every Melburnian knows the West Gate Bridge, crossing the Yarra River north of its exit to Port Phillip Bay. It looms, it hums, it holds memory, it writhes. You know the feeling – that perceptible flex when you’re stopped in traffic and the lanes moving the other way send a tremor through the deck. Unnerving. Oddly exciting. For years I lived within walking distance, running beneath its great grey pylons in the early morning quiet, the city grinding awake above me. On the western bank, a memorial honours the 35 men who died when the bridge fell in 1970. It is part of Melbourne’s bones. More than that, it’s an artery, one that for decades has carried the city’s working lifeblood from the west and back again, tens of thousands of times a day. The west is historically Melbourne’s labour country, home to tradies, nurses, warehouse workers, wharfies and migrant families who built this city with their hands. Cut that artery and the whole body suffers. The collapse of the West Gate Bridge during construction in 1970 remains Australia’s worst industrial disaster. This history is now brought to the stage in Melbourne Theatre Company’s West Gate, directed by Iain Sinclair and written by Dennis McIntosh.

The organisational, and the personal McIntosh’s drama unfolds across two registers. The first is organisational: the bridge’s designer, Freeman Fox & Partners, is already a firm under pressure – their Cleddau Bridge in Wales had collapsed just four months prior, killing four workers. Company representative McAllister (Peter Houghton) arrives in Melbourne from Britain to steady the ship, assuring local crews he’s “no coffee sipping desk jockey”; he’s on the ground. Meanwhile, he and other white-collar figures trade blame over mounting site problems while the labourers absorb the risk.

The second register is personal, and it is where the play finds its warmth. At its heart is the budding friendship between Italian migrant Victor (Steve Bastoni) and Young Scrapper (Darcy Kent), an English lad who carries his father’s appetite for confrontation while quietly changing his name on his union card to distance himself from the shame of having a father awaiting parole. Victor’s wife is pregnant with their fourth child. (The play is a little too deliberate in signposting which of the two men will not survive what is coming.) The first half unfolds before an enormous concrete pylon dominating an otherwise bare stage. A lighting rig ascends and descends to suggest the levels on which the crew labour, lending a visceral sense of scale. Christina Smith’s set and costume design capture a strong industrial aesthetic of the period, while Sinclair carves the stage into shifting pockets of action. Working with lighting designer Niklas Pajanti and sound designer Kelly Ryall, he gives the construction site a genuine sense of buzzing, dangerous momentum. The inevitable bridge collapse is a moment of theatrical brilliance: breathtaking and shocking. The house plunges into darkness, pummelled by flashing lights, the roar of 2,000 tonnes of steel and concrete falling, and the chaos of recovering bodies. Yet the sequence exposes a difficulty inherent in staging a spectacle drawn from real tragedy. On opening night some audience members applauded – an understandable response to remarkable stagecraft, but awkward given survivors and families of the dead were likely in the room. Too little space for mourning The second half centres the relationship between Young Scrapper and Victor’s newly widowed wife, Frankie (Daniela Farinacci), as they grapple with grief and uncertainty. These scenes, along with others featuring surviving bridge workers, are the play’s most human moments. Yet McIntosh moves through them with a restlessness that undermines the weight of what has just occurred, pivoting toward something closer to a resilience narrative. This attempt to spin heroes from victims feels more redemptive than honest.

Throughout, the writing leans on familiar types: the proud migrant, the larrikin labourer, the blustering company man. The actors struggle to build emotional nuance for their characters given the script’s tendency toward archetypes over individuals. Even Sinclair’s skilled direction can only do so much. This, ultimately, is where West Gate falls short. The play keeps returning to cataloguing institutional failure – the jurisdictional disputes, the engineering errors, the accumulating warning signs of impending disaster. But documentary film handles this terrain more naturally; a 2020 50th anniversary documentary covers it with the rigour such material demands. What theatre can do that documentary cannot is render loss at a human scale, asking audiences to sit with the emotional consequences of catastrophe, the grief that settles into families, the futures that never unfold. A death of this nature is not only a statistic; it is a traumatic rupture in a life and community. West Gate gestures toward this dimension, but its return to procedural explanation leaves too little space for mourning to take hold. The production powerfully reconstructs the event, yet stops short of fully confronting the human devastation that lingers and marks the bridge’s legacy today. West Gate is at Melbourne Theatre Company until April 18.

Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.