I shall start with the first two paragraphs from my October 2007 review of Warhorse at the National Theatre. 

What Michael Morpurgo’s novel does is to place the horse centre stage, so that episodes in the First World War are seen from an equine point of view. The curious effect is that in this “war to end all wars” you realise that on the opposing side are good men who love horses. You hate what war does because horses get hurt and killed or die of overwork and malnutrition. But how to stage a play where the central character is a horse?

Never for one moment did I think a production based on puppet characters could engage me emotionally but I was blown away from the very first moment of watching the foal onstage. My brain told me that there were three actors managing the colt’s body but in my heart I was convinced that I was watching a young animal running around a paddock. There are two things to admire about this lovely play.

To begin with there’s the sheer technical brilliance of the engineering, the perfection of the horse’s body and how it works – this is what the men talked about at the interval. Then there is the visual and emotional realism, a horse that twitches its ears and breathes and moves like a real animal, eats grass and whinnies and has a human rider on its back: the leap that your imagination can make so that you believe you are watching a live horse – this is what the women talked about at the interval.  (Apologies for the sexist observation.)