The Dunsmuirs: Alone at the Edge

David E. Kemp is head of the Drama Department at Queen’s University.

“Alone at the Edge” is the first of three plays in a saga about one
of Canada’s wealthiest and most ruthless families. The play tells of
the disgrace and exile of Robbie Dunsmuir from Scotland, the settlement
of his family as indentured laborers to the Hudson’s Bay Company in
the Nanaimo coal fields, and his application of “scab” labor tactics
that win him an independent prospector’s licence from the Company. His
discovery of a vast coal deposit on Vancouver Island, and his scramble
to first finance and then gain control over the Wellington Mine on this
site, literally over the dead bodies of his friends and supporters,
brings the play to a stunning climax. Appropriately staged successfully
at the Nanaimo Festival, Langley’s play has everything—ambition,
greed, ruthlessness, scandal, danger, and despair: all the things that
made life worth living for the Dunsmuirs, the Vancouver Island dynasty
who rivalled the Ewings in their personal and business machinations.

“Alone at the Edge” is a fascinating, absorbing, and exciting epic
that is written in a tight and lively manner by a playwright whose
theatrical credentials are impeccable and whose sense of the dramatic is
as refined as that of any writer in Canada.