THERE is such savage beauty, such ravishing cruelty in Helena Kaut-Howson’s production of Federico García Lorca’s 1934 folk tragedy that it leaves you torn. The play, in Frank McGuinness’s sinewy translation, sets the sacred against the profane, sensuality against repression and duty against instinct. Its battles are fought in song, ritual and richly symbolic dialogue dragged from the characters’ gut and from the earth on which their livelihoods depend. At its centre is Yerma, whose name means barren, and who yearns in vain for a child.

Kathryn Hunter’s enthralling lead performance and Kaut-Howson’s full-blooded approach embrace García Lorca’s poetry to create a throbbing, thrillingly realised whole.

Lilja Blumenfeld’s set is as bleakly unyielding as Yerma’s fate — hard, white stone, with a central, vulva-shaped black pool surrounded by rocks. In this inhospitable terrain Hunter’s Yerma and her husband, Juan, farm and graze their flocks. She is surrounded by bruising evidence that even here, fecundity abounds.

Her neighbours chatter of lovers and pregnancies; and Victor, a shepherd for whom she feels an unspoken desire, is tantalisingly within reach. Yet social strictures and her own moral integrity forbid Yerma to stray. Driven by misery to the brink of madness, she resorts to religious pilgrimage, superstition and pagan rites to make her marriage fruitful. But nothing can allay the violent consequence of her despair.

Yerma is agonised at her loss not only of motherhood, but of her feminine identity. She seems suffused with heat, feverish with breathless fear, longing and pain. Struggling to detain Antonio Gil-Martinez’s wearily helpless Juan from the fields, she clings, caresses and, on the pretext of offering nourishment, pours milk over his mouth and chest. It’s an unstintingly raw performance.

It’s supported by an impressive multinational ensemble, with rhythmic choreography by Sian Williams and live music directed by Tayo Akinbode that help to create a dream-like atmosphere of wonderment and brutality. A sequence in which the village girls, stripped to their underwear, wash laundry in the river becomes an ecstatic duel when Juan’s censorious, black-clad sisters appear. The girls defiantly thwack their linen against the ground, beads of water flying; the sisters retort with even greater ferocity, building to a climax of sound, movement and passion. This is a soul’s voice made vividly theatrical — an experience of wild intensity.

Box office: 020-7503 1646