By Will Cox
In Melbourne Theatre Company’s base in Southbank, the cast are gathering for a run-through of Destiny, a new play written by and starring Kirsty Marillier.
Destiny is set in the outskirts of a regional South African town, hundreds of kilometres from the politics of Pretoria. Della, played by Marillier, works in the local shop and takes care of her brother and father. The actors are on a mock-up set, but reference photos pinned to the wall give a flavour: earthy tones, sparse towns clinging to African hillsides, and some killer 1970s fashions: flared pants, Afros and polyester shirts. Behind the living room set, a wide-open sky.
Barry Conrad and Kirsty Marillier in rehearsal for Destiny.Credit: Josh Scott
Then Della’s ex-boyfriend Ezra (Barry Conrad) shows up. He’s back from university, bringing a Cape Town twang and big-city ideas about equality and revolution. Ezra’s been “consciontised”. The word is spoken in hushed tones. It’s dangerous. He tells Della’s younger brother that living under nationalist rule is like being sour milk in a bottle. “We need to smash the bottle.”
“I’ve been describing the play as ‘What would you do if the guy who shattered your heart into pieces was also trying to recruit your brother into the revolution?’” laughs Marillier.
The play has a stacked cast. Marillier and Conrad are joined by Patrick Williams as Della’s father Cliff, and Gaz Dutlow as her tearaway teenage brother. Director Zindzi Okenyo recently headed up Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Sweat, and also directed Marillier’s debut play, Orange Thrower, at Griffin Theatre Company in 2022.
It’s not clear exactly where Destiny takes place, but we can speculate it’s somewhere around KwaZulu-Natal, where Marillier was born. Her parents went to segregated schools, and she was born into the tail end of the apartheid regime. As a child, she often overheard conversations about the country’s segregated past.
Kirsty Marillier both wrote the script and stars in the play Destiny.Credit: Eddie Jim
“The amount of times I was like, ‘What happened?’” says Marillier. “‘What was life like back then?’ But they’re reluctant to go back there. It was a painful time.”
But she persisted. She wanted to write something set in another time. The result is Destiny. After long discussions with her father, she zeroed in on 1976, just before the Soweto Uprising. Della and her family are sheltered from the political turmoil the country will soon face.
The Soweto Uprising – mass protests against the imposition of the Afrikaans language on black schoolchildren – was a flashpoint for the country. The police came down hard on the demonstrators, opening fire on crowds of children.
“There had been a level of police brutality that people had an inkling of but perhaps weren’t 100 per cent convinced about,” says Marillier. Soweto was when that changed.
“I was interested in the intimate. This is a very personal story about this family of three.”
Kirsty Marillier, playwright and actor.
“The thing I’ve noticed writing this is that people were highly surveilled, controlled, mutated by fear,” says Marillier. “The presence of the government was so strong.”
Marillier’s writing is character-led, which she credits to being an actor before she was a writer.
“So many apartheid stories are so grand,” says Marillier. “Things like Invictus and Cry, the Beloved Country. I was interested in the intimate. This is a very personal story about this family of three. I’ve had all these anecdotes from aunties and uncles, and I’ve done mountains of research, but I’ve also had to dig in and place myself there. What would it be like to be a young woman in this time?”
Marillier wrote Destiny over several years, while she was working on Home and Away.
Gaz Dutlow, Kirsty Marillier, Barry Conrad and Director Zindzi OkenyoCredit: Josh Scott
“You learn so much from just getting up and going again,” she says of her time on the show. “You’re reading new scripts and you get an idea about how they generate story.”
This is her third play. The first two met with considerable acclaim: Orange Thrower won the 2019 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award and the Nick Enright Prize at the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, and The Zap was nominated for the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in 2022 and won the Max Afford Playwrights Award in 2020.
Marillier is in the odd position right now of handing the play over to a cast and director, but also playing a key role herself. “I’ve been hunched over my laptop for years, and I’ve written certain rhythms,” she says. “But now, being on the floor, I have to break those rhythms.”
It’s turning the personal into the universal. Marillier watches as hints of the voices of family members she’d written into the play become something new. Notably, there are two other South Africans in the cast – Conrad and Dutlow – who bring their own personal dimensions to the play.
“Thank god for them,” she says. “They can bring things to life in a way that I could never. You have a very concrete idea of what it is when you’re hunched over your laptop, but seeing the characters embodied is something else.”
Destiny is on at Southbank Theatre from August 18 to September 13.
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