Yerma, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

"A woman has the blood for four, five children," says Yerma. "If she doesn't have them, it turns to poison." The heroine of Federico Garcia Lorca's play has been married for seven years and the poison is throbbing in her veins. "There's nothing wrong with me," says her husband, and Yerma counters by reminding him how joyful she was on their wedding night. She was a full-blown woman from the start wasn't she? Although Yerma repeatedly tells Juan that she loves him, one hears, behind this desperate fervour, her hatred.

Inspired by his father's first marriage to a woman who died after 14 years of childlessness, Lorca may also have been expressing the anger and fear he lived with as a homosexual in 1930s priest-ridden Spain. Yerma lives in a village where the women are only expected to leave their homes for such necessary trips as bringing supper to their men in the fields. Yerma sitting in front of her house arouses comment, her going for a walk makes her husband suspicious; when she stops to talk to a male neighbour, Juan brings his two sisters to live with them in order to watch her. Yerma is surrounded with contempt and condescension. "So much to suffer!" says a friend. "But remember the wounds of Our Lord!" The only character exempt from this high-minded morbidity is an old woman who advises, with a wink: "Look down the road." But the faithful Yerma will have none of this.

Pam Gems' straightforward, heartfelt translation is highly effective, down to its last line, when Yerma's frustration erupts into sickening violence. With a bare, sun-bleached stage and incidental music on guitar, flute and drum, the director Helena Kaut-Howson conveys the harshness of the milieu, and the two sequences in which the villagers' repressed feelings break free are well choreographed. While washing clothes at the river, the women, stripped to their underwear, roar with laughter as they sing rude songs. And a religious pilgrimage for barren women turns into a saturnalia, with prayers giving way to a more direct approach to fertility.

What keeps this rather good Yerma from being excellent is the casting. Not only Denise Black in the title role, but also all the villagers, make woefully unconvincing Spanish peasants. Their movements and voices are far too light, with none of the earthiness and power of primitive villagers. The young women prancing by the river could almost be schoolgirls on a wilderness weekend. The production as a whole, though, is better than one would expect from its worrisome beginning – a spotlight focuses on a small statue of a boy, which a man holds aloft to Yerma. Far from being pathetic or mystical, this unprepossessing figure looks like a rejected Cabbage Patch doll.

To 22 February (0161 833 9833)