The group of ten- or eleven-year-old boys in Row 5 of the stalls giggled at their bad luck as I took my seat in front of them. But not even someone as tall and broad as me could obscure the now-famous puppetry of War Horse, of which this German première is the first ever non-English-language transfer from Britain’s National Theatre. The moment the foal Joey trotted stage front and looked at the audience – and we, as one, looked back into his eyes, entirely oblivious to the trio of puppeteers manipulating the life-size wood-and-leather figure – there came an audible “Oh, mein Gott!” of wonder from behind me. After several repetitions over the next half-hour or so, the boyish ostentation of the “mein Gott” vanished and the gasps became entirely spontaneous.

Although the German arm of production company Stage Entertainment is sufficiently enthused to have got behind this transfer, it’s by no means certain that Berlin will take the show to its heart as other cities have done. (It is still running in New York and Toronto as well as London, and has played more limited runs in major Australian cities.) In Berlin, it has in effect to carve out its own niche in the city’s theatrical ecology. The two principal constituencies here are the subsidised art-houses and the stage spectaculars in the biggest venues; there is no ready-made slot between them for such visually arresting, commercial yet serious work. Recent presentations (likewise under Stage Entertainment’s aegis) at the Theater des Westens itself include Dance Of The Vampires (a stage musical of Polanski's film The Fearless Vampire Killers) and – I kid you not – a Bavarian-Western comedy-musical entitled The Shoe Of The Manitou. The latter was co-adapted (from a cult German film) by Deutsches Theater dramaturg John von Düffel, who has also rendered Nick Stafford’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book into German here. (I do not know whether he is also responsible for the German lyrics to John Tams’ songs, which seem to work in German with the same simple directness of the folk idiom; indeed, in an example of that too-reductive genre categorisation I mentioned, German media coverage ahead of the opening has tended to refer to the show as a musical.)

Von Düffel has faced two principal problems. The first is that World War One, unlike its successor, is almost entirely absent from Germany’s national historical conversation. The “NS-Zeit” of 1933-45 is ineradicably present in the collective consciousness, and the post-war Versailles settlement of 1919 constitutes one of the factors which created a Germany where National Socialism could arise, but the Great War itself has virtually no place; in a city so given to commemoration, there is not even a WW1 memorial. The upcoming centenary of the outbreak of World War One will not be commemorated in Germany as in Britain: the German intention is for greater reflection, perhaps involvement in other countries’ events rather than a significant programme of its own, and to emphasise the value of the European Union in having prevented such conflicts over the last 60-odd years. This lack of substantive consciousness may be one reason why Steven Spielberg’s film version of War Horse flopped in Germany.

This unfamiliarity and awkwardness are then compounded by the fact that audiences are asked in effect to identify primarily with English points of view and to consider their own compatriots as the enemy. True, at bottom this is (especially in its stage version) a simple love story between man and animal; true, too, young human protagonist Albert is not a jingoistic embodiment of Englishness but comes rather from a small village in Devon, which plays to a strain that still persists in German collective consciousness of the honesty and common nobility of working on the land. War, too, is hell whichever side you’re on, as Joey’s own experiences testify when, having had a cavalry officer shot off his back in a misguided, outdated charge upon machine-gun emplacements, he is then seconded for use drawing German ambulances and ultimately field artillery. Nevertheless, telling this story to this audience requires of them a fairly hefty shift in perspective.

This has been addressed to some extent by softening the principal German characters where possible. However, there is only so much mitigation that can be done to the character of Klausen (Christoph Bangerter), the soldier who sticks to the military ethos; we really only see his conscience too late, after he has shown himself disquietingly ready to solve problems with his trigger-finger. If this portrayal does not overcome the audience’s uneasiness, it is much easier in the case of Friedrich (Andreas Köhler), who is as considerate a companion to Joey as Philipp Lind’s Albert, and who rescues orphaned French girl Emilie into the bargain. A distrust of militarism common now to both countries also helps, personified in the figure of the foul-mouthed British sergeant: “I’m not a bloody officer, I work for my money!” is as recognisable a bellow in German as in English.

Polly Findlay, who assisted on the original London production, has overseen the transfer of the trademark staging, with Rae Smith’s projected monochrome sketches on a great torn strip across the backdrop and, of course, that now-legendary Handspring puppetry. Initial press coverage has tended, as in Britain, to centre on the spectacle both of the show itself and of its gala opening night (the evening after the press performance), so at the time of writing detailed critical analysis in the German press is not yet available. (Some references have been made, as in Britain, to the fact that the story’s origins in a children’s book have resulted in slightly simplistic characterisations and treatment of themes.) Still, if it does not succeed here it will not be for want of dramatic effectiveness. Certainly, on the press night when it played to an audience of real people rather than figures expected to enthuse professionally, those boys behind me got very bored by the number of curtain calls.

Written for the Financial Times.