New play ‘Snapped’ tackles issues of loss, grief and mortality
MAGNET Theatre’s latest production, Snapped, is set to premiere at the Baxter Flipside from Thursday, September 16.
Snapped explores societal issues, including relationships between fathers and daughters and what it means to be a good man. It also tackles loss, grief and mortality.
Written and performed by Jennie Reznek and directed by Mark Fleishman, Snapped features Magnet graduates Carlo Daniels, who plays the father, an unknown stretcher bearer and various other characters, and Sithyilelo Makupula, who plays the “crew”.
Commenting on the show, Reznek explains: “I wrote the play during the lockdown. Although it has been brewing ever since my father died 16 years ago.
“Once I had made I Turned Away And She Was Gone, which dealt with a relationship between a mother and her daughter and was in response really to my own mother’s death, the space opened up for this new work as follow on.”
She adds: “In Snapped, I look at a woman’s relationship with her father and the impossibilities of dealing with his death and his absence from the world.
“It’s also an encounter with a rich archive of photographs and films that
my father left in this world when he died. The play uses these photographs and images from this historical archive as an integral part of the performance.”
The play intersects two stories: that of a woman stuck in grief for her father, and that of a South African stretcher bearer from the Cape Corps who is stuck in a grave in Italy after the World War II, unable to return home to his family and his country.
Layered with multiple themes, Snapped is a celebration of the resilience of human creativity as it cuts through, and finds ways to deal with, these difficult themes.
The 80-minute work is a visually arresting, moving and powerful production that takes the risk to unpack one of the hardest aspects of the
human condition: mortality.
Like grief, the story does not proceed in straight lines. Instead, it curves and circles back on itself in a poetic musical progression.
Snapped runs at the Baxter Flipside until Saturday, October 2, 2pm and 7pm.
Tickets at available at Webtickets from R65 to R150.