Part of the Picture

Writer/director Tom Cooper’s play is a moving tribute to the 167 men who died in a huge gas explosion on the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea in 1988. Sprinklers failed; life-boats didn’t inflate. Men dived hundreds of feet into a sea coated with burning oil. Occidental, who owned the rig, paid out compensation after a public inquiry, but never actually faced charges.

It’s a story clearly worth retelling, and one which can’t help but recall the recent Grenfell Tower tragedy, and how capitalism can lead to a callous lack of care towards human lives. But this play gently makes this point through telling human stories; it’s based on interviews with offshore oil workers, although it remains a flexible, fictional thing rather than a verbatim account.

Key to Cooper’s way in is the figure of an artist—based on Sue Jane Taylor—who spends time on the Alpha Piper rig, drawing the men at work. She’s our eyes on this “muscular, hard, salty world”; we see its beauty and toughness through her. She’s also a canny fish-out-of-water device: the only woman in a totally macho environment. Her discussions with the men she draws allow an insight into the softer inner lives of these joshing, just-doing-my-job blokes.

Folk music threads through the action, adding another dimension, although some of the lyrics are a bit over-earnest. Young Glasgow company Bletherbox show real promise here: Part of the Picture needs more drive and urgency in its pacing, but this retelling of a tragedy is thoughtful, humane and never mawkish.