Chris O’Neill and Ken Schwartz, the authors of Westray: The Long Way Home, are co-artistic directors of the theatre company Two Planks and a Passion, based in Canning, Nova Scotia.

This play is part of an established tradition in Canadian theatre, typified by Paul Thompson’s work at Theatre Passe Muraille in the 1970s (in particular, The Farm Show), of works created through collaboration between writers and actors that are intended to be “community-reflective.” This is always a delicate balancing act: the authors must pit their reliance on factual source material against their understandable concern for the sensibilities of the community, or communities, that the play is to reflect.

With a story like the Westray coal mine – which, according to Shaun Comish, who worked there, was a “hellhole” – and the horrific underground explosion of May 1992, what form should the work take? Should it focus on the explosion itself, like a Hollywood disaster movie, or should it use the theatre’s capacity for intelligent analysis to do an incisive hatchet job on the deal-making that led to the explosion?

O’Neill and Schwartz have opted for neither of these choices, and have instead created an intimate, naturalistic story of the effects of the disaster on three of the miners and two of their partners. By keeping their focus firmly on the quotidian, the authors may appear to rob their audience. They create, however, a real and moving sense of the story’s milieu.

I read the play in conjunction with Shaun Comish’s The Westray Tragedy: A Miner’s Story (Fernwood, 1993) and found the worlds evoked remarkably similar. Westray, the authors seem to be deliberately saying, was a tragedy of ordinary human proportions: ordinary greed and carelessness on the one hand, and fear and need on the other. “I don’t want any trouble,” says one of the miners when asked to join a union. “I got a family to feed…”

I am reminded of a comment by a reviewer of the original production of The Farm Show in Clinton, Ontario in 1972. She wrote that “the actors managed…not to bear false witness to…their new-found friends.” Westray: The Long Way Home may lack the elegant peaks and valleys of the “well-made play.” It has, I think, other objectives, and it has achieved them honourably: it has not borne false witness to those who worked and died in that “hellhole.”