"Venus and Adonis". Oxford Playhouse

Theatre has always depended on illusion. Few productions remind us of its power more beautifully than this one.

If an actor moved like a puppet, we would (quite accurately) describe them as 'wooden'. Movement in acting is a combination of natural, inbuilt character and rehearsed technique fitted to the character being portrayed.

With puppets, it's the other way around. There are no accustomed traits or quirks. The best actors aim to move with absolute precision. Marionettes don't move at all.

Or rather, they only move when they mean to. Human performers can never quite eliminate the accidental twitch, the unconscious shift of weight, the involuntary scratch of an eyebrow. A puppet has no such problem. It possesses only those movements deliberately bestowed upon it by its makers. Watching Greg Doran's exquisite production of Venus and Adonis is a lesson in theatrical economy. Nothing is wasted. Every gesture means something. Every tilt of a head, every bend of a wrist, every swing of a hare's dangling forelegs has been thought about, refined and lovingly executed.

This turns out to be a perfect match for Shakespeare's poem. Venus and Adonis is not interested in spiritual love, nor in the lofty sentiments that would dominate so much later poetry. It is a work obsessed with bodies. Venus kisses, grabs, flatters, pursues, cajoles and throws herself at the unfortunate Adonis with a comic lack of dignity. She is lust incarnate, full of the lascivious pleading of a wooden lute. What better medium for such a story than puppetry, the art form that distils performance to pure physical expression?

The danger with marionettes is that they're so artful and delicate, audiences admire them rather than love them. Doran's production avoids this trap completely by being consistently and uproariously funny. Venus spends much of the evening wagging her bottom at Adonis, slapping him when he refuses to cooperate, and pursuing him with the relentless determination of someone who has never once considered the possibility of rejection. The physical comedy is superb. Shakespeare's poem recounts a battle between erotic obsession and teenage indifference; here it becomes exactly that.

Narrating throughout is Simon Russell Beale, whose voice currently bears faint traces of his cancer treatment. There are moments when the familiar instrument sounds slightly fragile. Yet that fragility only deepens the performance. And some of the evening's most moving moments occur not between the puppets themselves, but between puppets and narrator. They look towards him; he looks back. The relationship feels less like that of actor and prop than creator and creation.

The production begins with a puppet Shakespeare writing the poem's dedication, gazing upwards in search of inspiration. And from the start the illusion is complete. He looks not real, but alive, wielding that same quill he still holds in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. His eyes catch Russell Beale's, and there is an acknowledgement of respect and indebtedness that somehow binds them across the impassable barriers of time and artifice. Behind him stands a giant Pollock's Toy Theatre brought magically to life, reminding us that we are looking at a theatre within a theatre, a reality within a reality, a puppet within a poem. 

Throughout the evening that backdrop transforms itself with dreamlike fluidity. Geese cross a painted sunrise. A hare lopes delicately across the stage. When the fatal boar approaches, its breath stirs Venus's shawl. Tiny details accumulate until the entire production feels like a cabinet of theatrical wonders.

And then death arrives. The backdrop changes shape and significance, becoming an embodiment of mortality itself, rather as the tree transforms into a skull after Siegfried's death in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen. The effect is startling. What had seemed a toy suddenly becomes tragic.

The achievement of this production is that after an hour in the company of marionettes, those materials cease to matter. You do not see puppets being manipulated. You see living creatures being attended. The operators stand around them like discreet servants, watching over lives that somehow seem to exist independently of their hands. Such is mastery. 

Oxford has just enjoyed one of the most remarkable terms of student drama I can remember. There have been unforgettable performances, ambitious productions and enough emerging talent to stock several regional theatres. The crowning glory of the season is neither actor nor director, neither playwright nor designer. It's a collection of wood, string and paint.