“Everything Is Intertwined”: How ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ Sets The Stage For The Netflix Series’s Epic Final Season

We’re a couple of weeks out from the opening night of Stranger Things: The First Shadow when I speak to the cast and crew of the show. They’re tired. “But good tired. There’s deep satisfaction in the tiredness,” says Patrick Vaill, who’s taking on the role of Dr. Brenner. “You try to put a TV show onstage and you just end up using your whole soul when you walk in the door,” finishes Louis McCartney, who plays Henry Creel, Dr. Brenner’s first “patient,” a.k.a. subject 001/Vecna. You see, Vaill and McCartney have been in rehearsals since May, and by this point, the two are finishing each other’s sentences.

Directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin and produced by Sonia Friedman—the mastermind behind the award-winning pyrotechnics in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—Stranger Things: The First Shadow was always going to be a West End event, but the level of acclaim it’s received since opening at the Phoenix Theatre a week ago has naturally been surreal for its younger cast members. Their work seems to be the number-one topic of conversation in every pub in Soho, with a series of rave reviews from theater critics declaring it a coup.

And while the finished production feels incredibly slick—successfully incorporating murder, dance sequences, a high school play, love triangles, and some genuinely dazzling special effects into its three-hour runtime—it was all very much down to the wire. “There’s a lot of things that have never been done before,” writer Kate Trefry told me not long before opening night. “So we’re kind of constantly trying to figure out if, in fact, they are possible. We’re still workshopping and testing out different illusions. Trying to figure out which effect is the best, which one’s the scariest, which ones you can count on. That’s been a big discovery.”

Even more than the stage design or special effects, diehard fans of the Duffer brothers’ series will be intrigued by the plot, which might just hold the key to Stranger Things’s epic ending. Set in Indiana 20 years before season one of the Netflix show, the play focuses on the life of Henry as a shy, awkward teen. Soon after he moves to Hawkins with his family, pets start winding up dead and the static radio begins going haywire, among other decidedly odd occurrences. Against the backdrop of this chaos, Creel is falling in love with Patty Newby (Ella Karuna Williams), the school principal’s adopted daughter. “The story is kind of a love triangle between Henry, his developing powers, and this girl. Everyone is pulling him in a different direction,” says Trefry. “But it’s still an ensemble story. We’re tracking Joyce and Hopper and Bob, too.”

The aforementioned trio spend much of the play working together as amateur sleuths, trying to figure out what on earth has made Hawkins suddenly go haywire. Bob, of course, is in love with Joyce (alas, it’s unrequited), while Joyce and Hopper seem to have their own thing going on. “I think that Joyce is a really interesting person,” says Isabella Pappas, playing the character made famous by Winona Ryder. “In the TV series, we meet her in the deep end. She’s having a mental breakdown, her son’s missing, she’s in a manic state. But in the play, we can rewind back and see what she was like when she was 18.”

“This is a prequel, so we’re meeting these characters for the first time in this story, which gives us a lot of freedom,” confirms Vaill. “Rather than stepping into a mold that you have to fill in a certain way, it’s closer to stepping into a role in classical theater that’s been played several times before.” Vital to helping every cast member get to the core of their character rather than cosplaying? The intimate involvement of Daldry and Martin. “The thing about Stephen is that he is a very present director—when you perform, you live and breathe because of his direction,” notes McCartney. “If I’m crying on the floor, Stephen will get down and cry on the floor with me to get the emotional journey. And it bloody works.”