In what may be the most affecting, brutal theatrical work you'll ever see, director Jaco Bouwer and writer Willem Anker have brought to the stage Korean author Han Kang's bleakly devastating three-part novel about a woman who first eschews meat, then food, as she imagines herself becoming a tree.

One look at the stage and the first pangs of panic set in: a sterile space enclosed on three sides by strips of vinyl, the light bright white, the atmosphere sober, a metal table with wheels -- like a gurney -- in the centre of a floor covered by a sheet of plastic. It might be an abattoir or a butcher's backroom, a playroom for S&M kink, or the setting for some form of non-consensual violence.

Whatever it is, it's somewhere sinister, you can almost taste the foreboding as your eyes are drawn into this empty space which might be somewhere real or imaginary. Or a place you've been in a terrible dream.

You are not about to witness simply a play, beginning, middle, end, applause. You will be provoked, probed and emotionally prodded, your eyes violated, your imagination sent screaming into the hereafter.

There will be bags of meat, stage blood, first in droplets and later in puddles on that clean white floor; grisly descriptions of violence against animals, creatures being slaughtered in a series of nightmares. There will be talk of vegetarianism, a husband taking off his clothes, putting them on again, and then once again getting undressed....