Killing 35 workers, physically and psychologically injuring many more, and the subject of a Royal Commission, 1970’s mid-construction collapse of the West Gate Bridge is still Australia’s deadliest industrial accident.

Yet I don’t think it’s ever come up in conversation during all my decades of living in Melbourne. Dennis McIntosh’s new play about the lead-up to the disaster and its aftermath is a long-overdue reminder for the city.

Steve Bastoni and Darcy Kent in West Gate. Photo © Pia Johnson

West Gate is in the assured hands of director Iain Sinclair, whose powerfully sparse 2019 production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge remains one of MTC’s best of the past decade.

He has gathered some of that success’s talent, from the key creatives to actors Steve Bastoni, Daniela Farinacci and Simon Maiden, for this distinctly Australian take on working-class struggle, trauma and friendship.

A longtime blue-collar worker turned writer, McIntosh knows his subject extremely well. He focuses on a handful of fictional bridge workers, whose concerns about safety put them at odds with the site’s white collars. Two engineers from...