The ushers politely insist that you fix a sticker over the camera lens of your smartphones as you enter the auditorium for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which was hoped to be, and proves to be, the theatrical event of the year, and a much-needed shot in the arm for the West End.
That enforced secrecy is a testament to just how big a deal this stage spin-off to the phenomenal Netflix series is. In case your attention has been elsewhere since 2016 (understandable enough), Stranger Things is the Eighties-set sci-fi/horror saga about the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, centring on a plucky set of school-kids contending with hostile incursions from an alternate dimension referred to as the Upside Down.
With key input from the series’ American creators and show-runners, the Duffer Brothers (Matt and Ross), this is Netflix’s first stage venture, some five years in the hatching. Boasting a round of that familiar eerie theme-music as the action gets underway, eliciting excited audience whoops, the challenge of the Fifties-set prequel is to match the series’ visually potent, adrenal and mind-blowing nature – but immersively, in the flesh. In a recent interview, the young Duffers explained that they want it to feel “like a mega-episode of the show”.
To cut a long story short, and as suggested by the title, the main storyline here takes us to Hawkins when trouble started brewing, in 1959; a likeminded group of sleuthing high-school youths (known to fans from their older incarnations) – Bob Newby, Jim Hopper and Joyce Maldonado (later Byers, played by Winona Ryder in the series) – investigate the mysterious violent death of pets, and fumble their way towards the real culprit. For some this may be too much information, but the fact is that it’s barely possible to spoil, the impact of this show, which operates at a frequency that fizzes synapses and makes you feel you’ve entered a shadowy, dreamy realm.
As with Harry Potter (Sonia Friedman, who produced The Cursed Child in the West End, has produced this too) and the show’s director Stephen Daldry’s calling-card hit Billy Elliot, there’s a troubled lad at the heart of the story – namely, Henry Creel (Louis McCartney, making a spellbinding professional debut). Creel arrives in sleepy Hawkins, as a newcomer with a perturbed past and weird powers. Fans will know Creel walked into the frame in season four and this unpacks, with a deft script by Kate Trefry, the genesis of the series’ nemesis: Vecna, the diabolical entity ruling the alternate dimension, the Upside Down.
