After a successful debut season at the Baxter two years ago, Snapped is returning, this time to the Magnet Theatre venue from 6 to 23 September 2023.
Written by Jennie Reznek and directed by Mark Fleishman, this riveting two-hander was first presented as one of the Baxter’s first productions as lockdown restrictions lifted in 2021. Garnering no fewer than six Fleur du Cap Award Nominations for Best Lead Performance, Best Lighting Design, Best Original Music, Best Set Design, Best Videography and Best costume Design, this anti-war, text-punchy play sensitively and creatively deals with relationships between fathers and daughters and what it means to be a good man.
It tackles loss and grief – and what it takes to overcome these – and the futility and destructive nature of war. True to Magnet Theatre’s award-winning signature style, Snapped is an immersive experience inside a visual archive of striking imagery and original photography captured during the Second World War.
Joining Reznek onstage is Magnet graduate Carlo Daniels, who recently scooped two Fleur du Cap Theatre Awards at the 58th ceremony held in Cape Town earlier this year. In Snapped he plays the father as well as an unknown stretcher-bearer and various other characters. The play intersects two stories – that of a woman stuck in grief over the loss of her father, and of a young South African stretcher-bearer from the Cape Corps who was killed in action in World War ll and left behind in an Italian grave, his body unable to be returned to his family.
Formidable team of creatives
The production unites a formidable team of creatives such as Craig Leo on the set design and shadow puppetry, assisted by Leigh Bishop on costumes; sound design and score by Neo Muyanga, videography by Kirsti Cumming, choreography by Ina Wichterich, and lighting design by Themba Stewart and Mark Fleishman. These exceptional individuals are the same theatre-makers behind outstanding productions such as Antigone (not quite/quiet), I turned away and she was gone, Cargo and Rain in a Dead Man’s Footprints.
The title of the play refers to the ‘snaps’ or photographs that become remnants of peoples’ lives, pictorial reflections and visual mementos that retain their meaning long after the subjects are no longer with us. These images are intrinsically woven into the narrative – light and dark; light being the element that captures the images and is a reminder of its opposite, while the darkness accompanies emptiness, absence and loss.
What: Snapped Magnet Theatre
Where and when: Magnet Theatre, Observatory from 6 to 23 September 2023
Tickets: Webtickets
WS
