When you think of how best to represent the tragic tryst between the goddess of love and Earth’s most unearthly beautiful man, your first thought might not necessarily be, “Let’s do it with puppets.” That thought, in fact, might conjure all the raw eroticism of bashing your Barbies together as a child, and indeed, on the rare occasions when puppet love rears its head (pardon the pun) in popular culture, it’s more typically played for laughs - see ‘Loud As The Hell You Want’ from raunchy Sesame Street pastiche Avenue Q or the seemingly endless marionette love scene from Team America: World Police. But in the hands of Sir Greg Doran, and beautifully accented with on-stage narration from Simon Russell Beale and delicately plucked guitar from Nick Lee, Venus and Adonis showcases the full capabilities of the medium with incredible dynamism and fluidity.

It’s not that there aren’t laughs in this adaptation of Shakespeare’s epic verse - in fact, I’d say the medium allows the company to fully lean into the Bard’s bawdier lines, like Venus’ indulgent caressing of her own body as she recalls how Mars hung his ‘lance’ over her ‘altars’, or taking issue with the implication that Adonis may find her ‘lack[ing] in juice’ (she is not - respectfully, this is a juicy puppet). There was a particular guffaw from the crowd when, as Venus floats ethereally before him, he accidentally peeks up her skirt and visibly balks. Even today it still feels particularly subversive of Shakespeare to depict Venus as such a forward pursuer in this match, and even more so for Adonis to be so initially chaste and abstentious, and it’s a dynamic with which the entire company are clearly having a ton of fun. Beale’s delivery indulges in the poem’s more suggestive passages, and as for Lee’s scoring, I’ve never heard the throes of passion captured quite so evocatively on guitar.

But at the same time, the puppetry allows for both Venus and Adonis to move with an otherworldly sort of grace and, yes, sensuality, marking both them and their connection as something a little beyond human. When the two do finally consummate their passion, they come together in a pose that looks like something straight out of Caravaggio. The poem draws heavily on the distinction between higher love and base lust, and the production reflects this, moving from broader comedic beats to winsome, aerial choreography.

There’s also some ingenious character design going on that adds a heightened, fairytale intensity, especially for the narrative’s more sinister figures. When Death revealed himself through a sly alteration in the proscenium’s architecture, there were audible gasps, and the boar that seals Adonis’ fate is introduced with hulking, gory intensity. As it nears where Venus is hidden, you even see the cloth concealing her flicker with its ‘breath’ - truly no detail has been missed. It’s a tour-de-force of coordination and the entire puppetry team deserves nothing but praise.

And it draws from a pre-existing tradition within 16th century theatre! The first recorded puppet theatre performance was in 1600, when Shakespeare would have been 36, and during the plague, puppet theatres were allowed to remain open and indeed to tour up and down the country. The set-up for Venus and Adonis feels like the 21st century’s answer to that convention. With a single bard, a player, and a miniature stage, there’s something very courtly about the whole affair. Yet its blurring of the lines between narrator and narrated, as when a puppet hare bounds onto Lee’s shoulder and sniffs at Beale’s ankles, or when Beale and Venus lock eyes and share a moment of commiseration, lets in modern theatrical devices to turn this little diorama set into something that can reach out to us.

My only, only, note is that the action becomes more static in its final moments. Adonis’ death takes place offstage, and Venus’ monologue upon finding his body lacks the balletic sort of story-through-movement the rest of the production has perfected. When Adonis ‘melts like vapour from her sight’, his puppet is simply lowered offstage and the anemone flower that immortalises him is pushed up. Given how often melting and dissembling occurs as a motif in the poem, and the liquidity with which we’ve seen the two move, I was holding out for something a touch more fantastical for that metamorphosis, especially after the creative leap the production takes in personifying Death.

But even then, it does not lag; indeed at a lean hour-long run without an interval, Venus and Adonis is a small, but near perfectly-formed creation. Like its lovers, it dances on air between the lewd and the lyrical (a line which Shakespeare loved so much to tread) like it’s on winged feet.

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 mannerisms 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 operators. 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 envisions a battle between erotic obsession and teenage indifference; these puppets breathe life and personality into that vision.

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. And the fact that Shakespeare wrote his poem in the present tense makes it extraordinarily suitable for narration: Russell Beale seems to describe the events of the tale even as they unfold, a Master of Ceremonies at a tragic sideshow. In tandem with his storytelling, Nick Lee provides a gentle, minstrel-like accompaniment on classical guitar, intensifying both the poise and poignancy of the performance.

It 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 hot breath stirs Venus's shawl. Tiny details accumulate until the entire production feels like a cabinet of theatrical wonders. And - just as it does in the sonnets, as it does in Romeo and Juliet, as it does in that immortal, borrowed line from As You Like It, 'Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?' - physical desire triumphs over sterile philosophy. The puppets embrace, and, lifted on the wings of Chagall, float into the air.

And then death arrives. The backdrop changes shape and significance, becoming an embodiment of mortality itself, rather as Kriemhild's 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.