Stranger Things: The First Shadow review – Netflix explodes into the West End with thrills galore

Humungous projections, a big musical score, an onslaught of foam, dry ice and flares: this big-budget stage play from the ‘Stranger Things’ universe spares no bombastic effect to bring new audiences flocking to the West End

Isabella Pappas (Joyce Maldonado), Oscar Lloyd (James Hopper Jr), Christopher Buckley (Bob Newby) in ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ (Manuel Harlan)

With an opening scene that parks a hulking great Second World War battleship on stage, Stranger Things: The First Shadow wants to make one thing clear. This isn’t a quiet, quaint, self-consciously theatrical little play. It’s a massive all-out event calculated to thrill fans of the award-winning Netflix series with explosions, thrills, and jumpscares galore – plus a little taste of what’s coming in 2024’s fifth season of the show. But with writer Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) on board, it’s also got a surprising level of proper theatre cred for anyone who doesn’t come to it intricately versed in Stranger Things lore.

Technically, it’s a prequel to season five that expands on the backstory of season four’s emerging villain, Henry Creel – it’s co-written by Stranger Things writer Kate Trefry so it’s all fully canon. But you don’t really need to know that. We’re on familiar territory for anyone who’s watched a bit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Scooby-Doo: high school shenanigans colliding with supernatural chills as a gang of kids tries to make sense of creepy goings-on in their neighbourhood.

Teenage drama nut Joyce (winningly embodied by Isabella Pappas) just wants to stage a play. It’s 1959 Indiana, so the people are expecting the folksy, thigh-slapping joys of Oklahoma!, but she’s got other ideas, corralling her classmates into staging witchy drama Dark of the Moon. Soon, this play-within-a-play provides an uncanny mirror for the romance between shy, adopted outsider Patty (Ella Karuna Williams) and Henry (Louis McCartney), the new kid whose telepathic and telekinetic powers are a barely kept secret.