The Vegetarian

Using various materials and her usual dose of humour, Italian theatre director and actor Daria Deflorian creates a form of theatre that rides a fine line, mixing the most mundane aspects of life with dreamlike, neurotic and even fantastic moments that stand out abruptly on stage. In The Vegetarian, the novel by internationally renowned South Korean writer Han Kang, Yeong-hye, a young woman who leads a banal life, one day has such a blood-soaked dream that she throws out all of the meat in her freezer and decides to become a vegetarian. It’s the start of an increasingly strange transformation up until the moment she herself wants to become vegetation. From the moment she read the novel, Daria Deflorian knew that Yeong-hye, with her secret radical outlook, subversive dream and way of disrupting a standardised world would feel right at home in Deflorian’s theatre.