What to say about Stranger Things on stage that won’t constitute spoilers? And if I do spill any spoilers, will a shady government organisation come and make me disappear? It seems likely.
What I can say is that the queuing system was a little chaotic. For reasons best known to myself, we cut through Outernet from Tottenham Court Road and then around the back of Denmark Street, past the stage door of the Phoenix and ended up in this rainy alleyway, where there was a substantial queue already.
I’m always wary about joining queues unless I know what they’re for but a quick recee to the front suggested that yes, this was a queue for all parts of the theatre. Then a guy came past and told us that there was other entrances in Phoenix Street that had no queue so a number of people left ours and went round there. At which point, our started moving quickly but then they closed the entrance. All very confusing but the take-home point is this: If you go to see “Stranger Things” use the entrance on Phoenix Street and not the random alleyway queue.
And that’s all I can tell you. There is already ominous knocking on the door.
You want more? Oh, go on then. I’ll turn up the static on the radio and hopefully we won’t get found out.
(Incidentally, if this photo looks odd to you, it’s because I manually rotated it. Ever since Wes Anderson last week I’ve had an urge to photograph things dead on and rotate them if they’re not. Nathan apparently has the same urge)
It is an incredible show. I didn’t know how it was possible to make a theatre show have the same “feel” as a much-loved TV show but they managed it. At times, I forgot that we were watching live theatre because the special effects (moving smoke, slow motion) didn’t seem physically possible. I can usually tell how a play works – even with Totoro, the staging was incredible but you could see the backstage area where the house went to and how it came apart. Here, things just appeared and disappeared with seemingly no movement. I can’t get my head around it at all. Right from the opening – set on a wartime ship – it was hard to believe what we were seeing and hearing, to the extnet that it was almost physically painful at times and certainly nerve-jangling. It wholly pulled you in to the eerie world of Hawkins, Indiana but this time in a 1950s setting rather than the 1980s setting we know so well.
I would highly recommend re-watching Season Four before you go because the story of the Creel family is central to this plot. I didn’t know much about the show before going and thought it was just going to be a standalone story about Joyce, Hopper and Bob getting up to supernatural high jinx at supernatural high school. But the Vecna storyline was very much part of this and although I remembered it, it would have been better if I’d done my homework. I also missed a few subtleties around who the characters were – Alan Munson being the father of Eddie, for example – so pre-immersion is recommended. I also missed that the cat-obsessed Claudia goes on to be Dustin’s mother. I did twig who Ted and Karen were tho, unlike Nathan.
You can totally enjoy this show without having any prior knowledge of the Things verse as it works on its own as a self-contained storyline but I’m not sure why anyone would go to this without having ever watched the show. The big motifs of Stranger Things – the demigorgons and the mind flayer – appear only briefly so if you only had a passing interest, you probably would be a bit disappointed. But for fans, it is very recognisable as the same universe – from the red lighting to the incidental music to the familiar “teens being disbelieved by the grown ups” scene in the police station. The casting is spot-on – Joyce (Isabella Pappas) is a dead ringer for a young Winona Ryder, Hopper (Oscar Lloyd) looks like Steve and Bob (Christopher Buckley) does have a real Sean Astin vibe going on and no, we are still not over that scene where he met his end.The casting directors are lucky in a way because if you need to know how Winona Ryder or Sean Astin looked and spoke when they were teens, there is a whole host of source material. But also that’s a lot of pressure to find actors who can play such iconic parts. They did an amazing job.
The actor who played Henry Creel (Louis McCartney) is especially good. If you haven’t watched Season Four and are planning to, skip over this cause…yknow…major spoilers but this is a very complex character and going through all those emotional shifts night after night must be exhausting. It’s never clear in the show whether Henry is inherently evil or just possessed and this play doesn’t really clarify that – although the implication is that something happened to make him this way. It’s an intense internal struggle but here it’s pulled off immaculately.
I did have a nitpick at the midway point but I retracted it by the end. I wondered how Hopper, Joyce and Bob could possibly be unaware of the Upside Down after the events of 1959 but actually, their characters never stumble on the truth behind the Creel house happenings and so for them it would be just an unpleasant episode caused by a war veteran with PTSD. So that leaves them fresh and sceptical for when things stay going screwy again in 1983.
Just to touch on the age rating…the website says 12+ which our kids are in the ballpark for (Eva is nearly 12 and Roo is nearly 15) but neither of them have watched the show, so this was a parents-only trip out. We were lucky enough to have booked on the same night as some friends of ours and they did have a 12-year-old with them, who seemed unphased by the edgier moments. In fact, she seemed less strung out by it than Nathan was. It is an intense experience and gets very loud at times, so if you have a kid with sensory issues it might not be the best environment for them. There was some “adult” humour at times but nothing that 12-year-olds don’t already know about from school so while that might cause some awkward conversations, it wasn’t age-inappropriate. So I would think less around whether your child is teenage enough and more around their sensitivities. A calm 12-year-old will be happier with this than an anxious 15-year-old I reckon.
That’s about as much as I’m going to say as I don’t want to spoil it any more for anyone who’s planning to see it. But if you love the TV show, you will almost certainly love this. Go while you can!
No disclaimer needed as we paid for this one but all opinions remain honest and my own anyway
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