THEATRE director Angus Jackson first encountered playwright David Wood in his younger days when pursuing musical goals as a percussionist in Birmingham.

“I’m not even sure if I’d been to university yet,” he recalls.

The path led to their meeting in the Monmouth Coffee House for an hour, a meeting that involved discussing Lindsay Anderson’s If.

If and when they met again, what might happen? Well, their paths crossed again when Angus became associate director at the Chichester Festival Theatre. “I walked past him!” said Angus. “But we remembered each other, and we got talking and he said he was writing an adaptation of Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom.”

Wood’s adaptation, directed by Jackson, arrives at the Grand Opera House in York on February 26, on a tour fresh from a West End run at the Phoenix Theatre. Along with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Winter’s Tale, it will be the highlight of an upsurge in “serious drama” at the Cumberland Street theatre, in the wake of Theatre Royal Brighton Productions’ Dandy Dick and Blue/Orange last year.

Set in the dark and dangerous build-up to the Second World War, Goodnight Mister Tom follows sad, abused evacuee William Beech from London deprivation to the idyllic Devon countryside, where he builds a friendship with elderly recluse Tom Oakley (played by Oliver Ford Davies).

“It already existed as a musical and there was a TV adaptation and there have been other adaptations before now,” said Angus, whose production combines Wood’s moving and enchanting script with wartime songs and puppetry, one of the show’s distinctive features.

Watching a matinee at the Phoenix Theatre last month, the puppet for Sammy, Tom Oakley’s sheepdog, was the scene-stealing turn. The aforementioned musical had foregone having a dog in the show; a decision that now seems extraordinary given the reaction to Sammy in Wood’s version.

“We never tried it with a live dog – thought it had said in the script, ‘you may be able to do it with a real dog’, just as we had to think about doing the play with children rather than adults in the children’s roles, and we chose children” said Angus.

A puppet dog it would be, controlled and voiced by actress and puppeteer Elisa de Grey. “We built a prototype version and of course it was remarkable because though it looked like cardboard with felt tip pen markings, as soon as it started moving, it looked amazing,” says Angus.

The director’s past love of percussion informs the production’s use of sound effects.

“That’s down to me,” he said, smiling at the bursts of wartime noise in the London scenes.

“That’s what I stand for: the texture of things. I learned at university that it’s good when things go clunk and thump.

“Children like it – and so do adults, I believe.

“As I was once a percussionist, I’ve done shows before entirely with percussion, but then I graduated to crunches.”

• Goodnight Mister Tom will run at Grand Opera House, York, from February 26 to March 2. Performances: 7pm, Tuesday to Saturday; 1pm, Wednesday and Thursday; 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york