Now and then the theatre throws up a piece of work so exhilarating that it makes you rejoice to be alive. War Horse, adapted by Nick Stafford from the novel by the former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo and directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, is just such an occasion.

With the South African puppet company Handspring, the creative team has translated Morpurgo’s limpid, emotionally dense prose into a sweeping drama of extraordinary power. Following in the National’s recent tradition of challenging Christmas shows, this tale of love, loss and the horrors of conflict is harrowing, joyous and thrilling. And its sheer skill and invention are simply awe-inspiring.

The story follows Joey, the beloved horse of the farmer’s son Albert Narracott (Luke Treadaway), as he is sold to the Army at the outbreak of the First World War and shipped to France with the cavalry. But this is much more than just an equine adventure. As Albert is torn from Joey’s side, the horse becomes emblematic of every life imperilled by war – and it is this that gives the piece its startling potency. Joey’s sufferings are appalling, and the production never shies away from making them explicit – an approach rendered especially shattering by the fact that the puppetry is nothing short of miraculous.

Our first glimpse of Joey is as a stiff-legged, skittish foal; when the fully grown horse gallops into view, it’s a stunning sight. A skeleton of steel, wicker and leather, with three puppeteers visible within, the creature is manipulated with wondrous precision and delicacy. Stafford’s adaptation may lack Joey’s inner narrative voice as featured in Morpurgo’s book, but a tossed head, a swishing tail, a whinny of terror or flailing hooves are an equally eloquent and thoroughly theatrical equivalent.

Rae Smith’s seamlessly evocative designs, exquisitely lit by Paule Constable, effectively employ animation and video alongside a simple dirt-covered revolve, and Adrian Sutton’s score, blending weeping Vaughan Williams-like strings and folk songs by John Tams, adds aching poignancy. As Joey journeys from English meadows to nightmarish battlefield scenes of rolling tanks, snarled barbed wire and broken, wheezing horses pecked at by carrion crows, his struggle for survival unfailingly grips and moves.

Crucially, the human characters are drawn with equal care, with generosity of spirit and battle-hardened desperation among both the British and the German ranks. And Albert’s family life back in Devon, before he too enlists and joins the fighting, searching amid the carnage for Joey, is no rural idyll but, for all its pastoral loveliness, bedevilled by poverty and his feckless, boozy dad’s debts.

But what makes the piece so elating is its expression of how, in the worst circumstances imaginable, love and compassion can endure. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful.

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