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There's no horsing around with Joey, the star puppet of London's West End hit War Horse.

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The show has attracted almost four million viewers to date.

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And on this month's Art of Movement, Nick Glass finds out how Joey's handlers replicated movements of horses to bring the puppet to life.

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Is Joey, the star of War Horse, the most accomplished puppet ever made for the stage?

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Most nights of the week, he springs into life, manned by three puppeteers,

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and we, the audience, suspend belief [disbelief] and accept him as a living, breathing creature.

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On stage alone with Joey, I intuitively approach as I would a real horse,

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man and beast, two strangers meeting in an open field, feeling each other out.

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Joey is simply a wonder horse. He was only meant to have a six week canter at London's National Theatre.

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Six years later, he gallops on and on, on stages around the world.

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One, two, three, four. One, two, three four.

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If he goes faster, it goes into a trot, which is a two rhythm. One, two. One, two. One, two.

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And if he speeds up even more, he goes into a faster four count, which is galloping.

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And that's... but the... and the hind...

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That's amazing.

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He's beautiful, isn't he? I've... again, six years and I still get butterflies when I see that.

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Joey was designed and made by a specialist puppet company in Cape Town, South Africa.

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They had already made hyena, chimpanzee and giraffe puppets for their own productions.

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And just like the others, Joey had to be light and flexible.

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His spine is aluminum. The rest of him -- cane, plywood and fabric along with a few pulleys and bike levers.

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The big challenge was to make him realistic, to make him apparently think, react and feel on stage.

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And to achieve that, micro movement, as they call it, was crucial.

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The smallest twitch of the ear, the smallest twitch of the tail, little shudders of the skin -- all those things are really important in making meaning.

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So, one of the things we say to the puppeteers is be really careful about any odd movement,

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because the audience is hungry to read the movement all the time.

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The watershed moment in the designing of the ears was discovering how to make 180 degree movement out of the ear only controlled by this much finger movement that the puppeteer has,

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and basically reinvented an ancient old watch mechanism by mistake and found that it actually worked very nicely.

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Three puppeteers each operate a different part of Joey -- the head, the heart and the hind.

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But crucially, they must somehow perform and move as one.

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Yeah, as soon as we get into the horse, we start to breathe together off stage, before we come on stage.

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Sometimes, I know it sounds weird, but it feels like you kind of morph into the horse,

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like veins come out of your body, go into the puppet and you just... you are one.

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Breathing was crucial to bringing Joey to life.

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When I watched real horses, their lungs expand sideways.

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And I knew that wouldn't be very visible on the stage, so I cheated.

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The front manipulator of the horse can lower and raise the chest, and the audience absolutely buy it.

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They don't mind that it doesn't go sideways. As long as they can see it, it's fine.

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Puppetry is handmade. Puppetry is low-tech.

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When we go to the cinema these days and you watch a very high-tech film, an element of surprise and magic that is missing.

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And I think that the puppet asks the audience to provide that.