Destiny is a fierce new stage show exploring love, loss and rebellion under the shadow of apartheid South Africa

Award-winning playwright and actor Kristy Marillier’s new work, Destiny, is an ensemble drama set in 1976 South Africa, against a backdrop of rising resistance to the apartheid regime.

Commissioned and developed through Melbourne Theatre Company’s Next Stage Writers’ Program, Destiny is an intimate fictional family drama based on real world events.

Through a complex set of relationships, the play provides a searing insight into the fear, brutality, rebellion and activism of 1970s South Africa.

Della (played by Marillier) is the feisty protagonist and matriarch of the Meth family. Since her mother’s death, she has stepped into caring for both her hard-working and broken-hearted father Cliff (Patrick Williams), who has a tendency to drink and become lost in his memories and grief, and her antagonistic and excitable brother Rocky (Gaz Dutlow).

Della finds herself in dangerous territory when Ezra Jones (Barry Conrad) – a charismatic and irresistible student activist who broke her heart years earlier – returns to their small town to lie low.

Ezra’s confidence in his political views is both alluring and terrifying for the Meth family members, as they wrestle with a desire to imagine new futures while also struggling with the grief and fear that dominates their past.

The impressionable Rocky is particularly seduced by the seductive glamour of Ezra and his cause, and yearns for the kind of freedom he represents.

Fractured within and without

The story is set largely in the Meth family home, with a black and white portrait of Della’s mother taking centre place on the living room wall.

Cliff can often be found chatting and singing to the photograph of his long departed wife. The domestic space is represented as porous and permeable, with a summer breeze that blows through the kitchen windows and lifts the lace curtains. The front door opens on to an often wide-open stoop.

This family home, in an unnamed small mountainous town, is far away from the politics of the city – yet not immune from the effects of brutal policies and regimes.

The domestic setting becomes the site of both grief and joy of an epic and intimate nature, with the family’s personal tragedy reverberating within the broader injustices of their context. The fractures in the family are inextricably tied to the fractures in society at large.

Beyond the interior and exterior of the Meth family home, set designer Sophie Woodward has created a series of angular pathways evoking the mountainous terrain, leading to the simple general store where Della works.

Rich emotional terrain

In one powerful moment, Della tells the story of a white woman who comes to the coloured part of town, to the coloured general store where Della works, seeking a specific treat for her son. This tale hints at the casual cruelty routinely endured by the Meth family, and others who the system classifies as lesser.

Despite these harsh realities, there are many gloriously funny, laugh out loud moments throughout the play. The writer, performers and director Zindzi Okenyo all deftly employ humour, and the characters are enormously likeable. As the story unfolds, love, loss, hope and uncertainty all coalesce around a deceptively simple family tale.

There is also a deeply personal note present in the writing and performances – which may be explained by the fact that three of the actors have parents who lived through apartheid.

The title of the play evokes the inevitable ramifications of our choices on the future. Resistance and rebellion come at great personal cost, but ultimately create hope for a new future – just as they did in the 1970s in apartheid South Africa.