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[title]Not since ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ has there been such a major West End crossover as ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’, a 1959-set prequel to the Netflix retro horror smash. But why turn it into a play? What’s it about? Do you need to watch all four seasons before seeing it? Is it canon?
To answer these questions and more I caught up with its author Kate Trefry, who has also been staff writer for ‘Stranger Things’ (the TV show) since just before the first season launched way back in 2016.
As well as writing across all four subsequent seasons – including the still-being-filmed fifth –she’s now taken on the mantle of playwright, to adapt a story thrashed out by show creators the Duffer brothers and playwright Jack Thorne, which follows the show’s adult cast as young people in the town of Hawkins, Indiana.
How did ‘The First Shadow’ come about? It’s pretty much unprecedented for a TV show to have a spin-off play…
‘[Director] Steven Daldry came to the Duffers with the idea of doing a play and then Steven and the Duffers and Jack Thorne kind of broke the big ideas. I wasn't hired until the Duffers had time to think about it, which was a year and a half later: I started working on the play while we were writing season five.’
Why were you given the job of writing it?
‘I don't think that anyone who wasn't in the writer's room could do it because it's a really complicated piece that needs to stand alone, but also connect to all the canon from the four previous seasons and then also to what’s going to happen in season five.
’There's 100,000 moving parts, dangling threads everywhere, that have to all be tied together. I think that being able to live in both worlds made me kind of the only one who could do it.’
Season four of ‘Stranger Things’ includes sequences set in 1959 that focus on the childhood of show antagonist Henry Creel/Vecna. Given Henry is a character in ‘First Shadow’, is it reasonable to assume the plot of the play will cover similar ground?
‘In season four we learn about Henry Creel and his disruptive presence in Hawkins, as told from the point of view of his dad, Victor Creel, who's in the mental hospital. And then we hear kind of a different version from Vecna as he's telling his spooky story to Nancy. This play is set about the same time, when Henry first arrives in Hawkins and things start to go really wrong. But it’s told from a more universal perspective. And so you really understand what happened and why it happened and how he ended up with killing his family and how he ended up with [another show antagonist] Doctor Brenner’.
A big difference is that ‘First Shadow’ features pretty much the entire adult cast of the TV show in their younger, 1959 incarnations – is the idea of a younger Jim Hopper etcetera something you’d given much thought to before?
‘We'd joke about it all the time in the writers’ room, but I hadn't really spent a lot of time thinking about who they were before, because there's always so much shit that's happening to them in the moment. So it was really a joy to go back and try to reverse-engineer the characters. And, you know, it's fun to tell a story about what people could be, knowing the tragedy of who they became.’
‘Stranger Things’ the TV show is very much based on special effects and fantasy horror. Will the stage play be going for a similar thing? Are there limits to what you can achieve on the stage?
‘Yes, that is very much part of it. We have had fun with people just talking: experimenting with if you were going to put two people in a room from “Stranger Things”, who would that be? But it is a different medium and we have to use the tools that we have to mess around with expectations.
‘The craziest thing has been that I just write something and [the creative team] say: maybe we can do that. I don't know the limitations of theatre and I have been dropped into this working environment where the people who do know the limitations of theatre are really excited to try to break all the rules and do something different.’
So to be clear, it’s totally canon, not like a sort of alternate or ‘what if’ type thing?
‘No, it's canon. That's part of the whole pitch of hiring me as someone who's never written a play – I can't necessarily guarantee it'll be a play, but I can guarantee it will be canon.’
And is the ideal viewing order seasons one to four, then ‘First Shadow’ then season five?
‘It is, yeah. It is certainly not necessary to see season five! But it does all fit in. And you'll have the most fun watching five if you've also watched the play, because five also deals with Vecna’s past in a really interesting way, which is totally interwoven with the play.’
People who’ve never seen ‘Stranger Things’ before will end up seeing the play for whatever reason – what’s the pitch to them?
‘I mean it's hard at this point to put myself in the shoes of someone who's never seen the show because it's literally all I do! But we've done a huge amount of work to try to make it accessible to all.
‘This is a story about a kid who has something wrong with him, something supernaturally wrong with him, and he's struggling in the fight for his identity and his moral selfhood, between these dark forces and his parents and his friends. It should stand alone.’
Given the writing is over for season five and it’s supposed to be the last season, is ‘Stranger Things’ done for you after this?
‘That's a good question! I might do a little bit more work on the last episodes with the Duffers if they need me to. And then I’m planning on going out to set when the episode I wrote is shooting. And then, who knows? Maybe there’s more…’
Stranger Things: The First Shadow is at the Phoenix Theatre, booking until Jun 30 2023. Buy tickets here.