'About Animals' by Elfriede Jelinek is so unprecedentedly ruthless and dire, you wish for a way out #tf2010

'Butt-fucking at extra cost.' 'Do they also do blow jobs without a condom?' 'That one sucked my cock once and then she was nauseated all night. In the morning she puked in my bed.' Continuously, they do suggestive dances and constantly look into the room, with fixed smiles that are somewhere between amused and sneaky. The six actors of About Animals are challenging and relentless. Susanne Kennedy's direction of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek's play is unprecedentedly bleak and arrives as a punch in the gut.

Jelinek's wrote a text about prostitutes and their clients, partly based on eavesdropping tapes from an Austrian escort agency, in which the men talk about women as if they were animals, or more precisely, like farmers talk about their cattle. In her direction, Kennedy places great emphasis on the viewer's gaze. 'The woman is being watched and is always an object, the man is watching and is the subject. Looking is not innocent,' She said in an interview. The three men, in foul light blue show suits, talk over the women; the women, in dresses on which little subtle emphasis is placed on their nipples and crotch, obligingly talk after them. They look at us defiantly, making us complicit in the humiliating situation.

But even more humiliating is the situation of the older woman, played by Antoinette Jelgersma. She participates in the game of watching and being watched, but the men have no interest in her. She has a discarded body and is thus reduced to nothing. She is 'an object hiding from use by craving it'. Occasionally, she falls into something like excorsism; the dozens of televisions in the set start to interfere, and with coarse voice distortion, she rants a kind of porn prayer.

Pleasant theatre it is not, but confrontational and penetrating it is. And it begs the question of whether Kennedy goes all the way with Jelinek's pessimism about the possibility of escaping the male gaze.

Fortunately, TF has been put together with care and a performance like About Animals relief by reflecting with other performances at the festival. For example, with Underground, another Jelinek text, directed by Johan Simons with less brilliance but a bit more perspective. Or with Hannah & Martin, which last weekend featured the philosophy of Heidegger, from which Jelinek fervently draws, by Lineke Rijxman-as-Hannah Arendt was more or less thrown in the rubbish.

But the most striking comparison, of course, is with Eleven Minutes by director Ola Mafalaani, which is less abstract but equally explicit about prostitution. Mafaalani sees prostitution simply as sex without love, and in the long final scene of Eleven Minutes the self-styled whore Anna learns with her lover, probing and gunnily, what sexual love means: a romantic ending. However, Jelinek writes: 'Loving is a certain way of being designated for.'

Kennedy's ending is more enigmatic. Jelgersma, now in wedding dress, turns the game around. The men are now there for her gratification, the grins on their faces unchanged. The whores die foaming. An awesomely ugly cover of Life is life plays. On the television screens, where until then only fleshy and moustachioed male faces could be seen, we suddenly see Jelgersma's face, without the weird wig, smiling happily. A victory for uninhibited, female sexuality? I hope so. In the world of dark hopelessness she so convincingly sketched earlier, a way out is desired.