Did Stranger Things: The First Shadow put the super in supernatural?

Alex Wood, WhatsOnStage

★★★★★

“Audiences are buffeted by wind, coated in haze, subjected to bloody scenes of gory panic, transported into mysterious realms, and made to witness huge set-pieces. All within the first four minutes. No one has phoned it in with this production – first proposed by director Stephen Daldry, who floated the idea to the streaming giant a few years back.”

“Everything is dialled up to 11 – from Miriam Buether’s unending number of elaborate and meticulously crafted sets, to Paul Arditti’s sound design, utilising effects familiar to fans of the series, to 59 Productions’ effective video design, featuring heavily from the off. Special credit has to go to illusions and visual FX designers Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, who dish out gripping and gruesome moments with awe-inspiring frequency.”

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian

★★★★★

“The production has the same sense of sprawling mystery [as the TV series], beginning with the disappearance of a wartime naval ship and a laboratory experiment that explains the birth of the Upside Down. There is no Eleven yet but Henry Creel (Louis McCartney), the new kid in town, brings dark powers. He has an oddball romance with Patty (Ella Karuna Williams) and a sinister relationship with Dr Brenner (Patrick Vaill).”

“There is speed, action and scale, with one coup de theatre after another and immense craft in Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin’s co-direction. A quotidian reality of high-school hallways and toilets morphs into eye-popping alternate worlds.”

Nick Curtis, Evening Standard

★★★★★

“It’s comparable to the theatrical alchemy of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but far more technically sophisticated, pushing monsters into the auditorium while a quintet of assured young lead actors keep things on a – mostly – human scale.”

“The staging adopts the TV series’ red neon colour coding and its ominous theme music. And you can see in the young characters’ performances seeds of their older onscreen incarnations, including Patrick Vaill’s thunderingly menacing Dr Brenner.”

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph 

★★★★★

“I can’t claim that, as a piece of drama, this is more than high-class hokum but what we get, as spectators, is a game-changing experience, one which combines state-of-the-art video wizardry with the tricks of the theatrical trade – sometimes as simple as roving flash-lights and dizzying stage-revolves. These ensure a suspenseful flow of jaw-dropping coups, ranging from the infernal, supernatural engulfing of a hulking US battle-ship at the fog-shrouded start, to acts of levitation and jolting violence, with malignant forces even materialising on our side of the proscenium arch. (If you don’t like creepy-crawlies, steer clear). It’s not so much the play, as the unforgettable atmosphere that’s the thing.”

Neil Armstrong, BBC

★★★★

“The First Shadow manages to capture the hectic, adolescent energy of the TV show at its best but does balance that with more reflective moments. There’s also a surprising amount of great comedy and a song-and-dance number that I didn’t see coming. A wide variety of locations – a school locker room, the police station, a sinister laboratory, the woods, a creepy attic – are skilfully evoked and excellent use is made of a revolving stage. The immersive sound design weaves in musical themes and motifs from the series.”

Alice Saville, The Independent

★★★★

“Subtlety isn’t really what they’re going for here. Where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child deals with the challenges of creating a stage spin-off to a much-loved franchise by leaning on a kind of stripped-back theatricality, Stranger Things goes for all-out movie-style maximalism. Giant projections set the scene in loving detail, every scene has tension-building musical underscoring, and you’re never far from a 4D cinema-style onslaught of descending foam, dry ice, or flares.”

Dave Fargnoli, The Stage

★★★★

“Standing out in a strong ensemble, Ella Karuna Williams is by turns tender, tough and resourceful as lonely outsider Patty, chafing against her adoptive father’s strict Christian conservatism and finding surprising common ground with troubled Henry. Oscar Lloyd and Isabella Pappas rise brilliantly to the challenge of portraying younger versions of fan-favourite characters Hopper and Joyce (David Harbour and Winona Ryder in the series), expertly mimicking their mannerisms and intonations.”

Clive Davis, The Times

★★

“If you’re familiar with Henry Creel, Joyce Maldonado and the other denizens of the town of Hawkins, home to a mysterious experimental centre, there’s fun to be had in identifying backstories and clues scattered across a lavish stage adaptation that opens in 1943 and quickly shifts to 1959. But the first-time playwright Kate Trefry, a writer and co-executive producer on the TV series, doesn’t begin to make the story accessible to newcomers.

“The first hour certainly has its moments, played out to tantalising fragments of American Graffiti-style rock’n’roll conjured up by the young would-be DJ Bob Newby (Christopher Buckley). I loved the fleeting glimpse of teen jive dancing.”