Napoleon’s ruthless betrayal of Boxer is not as tragic as it should be, partly because the latter’s story does not feel individuated or intimate enough. There is an emotional flatness and the focus is on action – making it more amenable to a young audience, although the violence may be too adult. There are attempts to draw us closer but the failings show just how tricky a story this is to stage. Napoleon (inspired by Stalin) is a gruff character but never becomes truly frightening, and where the book gives these animals inner lives and personalities, here those are briefly gestured at, sometimes in broad-brush ways.

Photograph: Manuel Harlanīut for all these phenomenal achievements, there is not always a palpable sense of fear or menace on the farm, and maybe not enough character development. Noirish visual melodrama … Boxer (puppeteers Elisa De Grey, Matt Tait and Rayo Patel) and Clover (puppeteers Yana Penrose and Edie Edmundson). It excels at staging a welter of violence without resorting to any visible blood and gore. Together with the lighting design (by Jon Clark), it contains flecks of kabuki – tightly focused movements to the beat of a drum-like note – and high-octane, Indiana Jones-style action adventure. The black-and-white palette – the white of the animals against the black of the set – brings noirish visual melodrama and the sound design (by Tom Gibbons) adds to it, with its vigorously thumping bass and arch orchestral accompaniments. Its corrugated iron panels, meanwhile, hint at a rusting dystopia.

The stagecraft also contains plenty of thrills and spills: there is a beautifully orchestrated blackness across Bunny Christie’s almost empty set, which captures the danger and darkness on the farm. There are some breathtaking scenes of puppets giving chase, and of two central battles between animals and humans, and a particularly magnificent moment when Boxer bursts out of the barn to defeat the farmers.

The only human character on stage is Farmer Jones (Jonathan Dryden Taylor), who is not the careless drunk of Orwell’s book but a crueller caricature. Puppeteers (14 in total) crouch or wrap themselves around these animals with incredible nimbleness, while the animals’ words are voiced by 10 actors including Juliet Stevenson and Robert Glenister. Phenomenal achievements … Animal Farm, with puppetry by Toby Olié.

Orwell's animal farm