Watching a dominee inspect and fondle a sixteen-year-old girl’s breast on a stage is disturbing, to put it plainly. Watching that same dominee drink water infused with period blood is enough to guarantee a walkout. 

Or if you watched Granaatsap on 29 March, that would be ten walkouts. 

Disturbing, surreal and deeply controversial, Granaatsap is a show that sits somewhere between revelation and blasphemy, depending on who you ask. 

‘Strange’ is an understatement, but so is everything about this piece. It leans fully into surreal and unsettling imagery, seen especially in Ouma Rina (played by Zara West) who for a large portion of the show parades around dressed in an oversized pomegranate. West’s performance is particularly spectacular because she manages to portray the ‘religious mania’ this character requires without overdoing it but also manages to shift seamlessly into something cold and cut-throat as the play progresses. It is a controlled and brilliant characterisation.

What Granaatsap does is force you to confront something, whether that is religion, repression, or your own relationship to both. This idea of confrontation is made literal in the set, especially when Ouma Rina hangs washing (including a sweat-stained school shirt) up on the walls for the audience to see – airing dirty laundry. 

The piece also makes striking use of silence, allowing lines to linger and tension to build until you are left sitting in anticipation for what comes next. Or that was the idea. In this particular performance, those silences were constantly interrupted by the scraping of chairs as people got up and walked out. Yet this only made the silence more potent. In those moments where the actors said nothing, it was the audience that spoke, or rather, those who chose to leave.

Granaatsap is not a comfortable watch, nor is it trying to be. It is disturbing, strange and unapologetically confrontational. It makes you contemplate not only the themes it explores but the very play itself. And, if you’ll allow it, your own reaction to it. 

Title: Granaatsap
With: Zara West, Ancois Bodenstein, Enzo Cocciante, Jean Retief and Kristen Fichardt
Director: Lisa Kukard
Until: 30 March