Theatre review: Stranger Things: The First Shadow

Netflix branch out from streaming to producing live theatre, but this new play is a spin-off from their tentpole Stranger Things, so there isn't too much fear that it'll get cancelled during the interval for not getting enough Instagram traction. The TV series is a 1980s nostalgia-tinged sci-fi/fantasy story about teenagers getting caught up in deadly adventures when their small town's reality starts bleeding into an alternate dimension known as The Upside Down. The First Shadow is a prequel that does the same for some of the central adult characters, taking them back to their high school days in the 1950s and making them face the first signs of a supernatural incursion into Hawkins, Indiana. In particular, the play serves as the backstory of the series' Big Bad, Henry Creel. But first there's a pre-credits sequence because yeah, when the credits are as iconic as Stranger Things' they're going to roll on stage as well.

Theatre review: The 47th

Mike Bartlett has played around with pastiche in the past, never more successfully than when King Charles III took Shakespearean themes and language and applied them to an imagined future of the British Royal family. Later this week he'll be premiering his take on Restoration Comedy, but for The 47th he returns to blank verse, also reuniting with director Rupert Goold, and Lydia Wilson on Lady Macbeth duties, although the venue changes to the much larger Old Vic, befitting a lead character who's fond of a rally: As with the previous production, most of the fictionalised characters aren't played as impressions of the real people, but Donald Trump's mannerisms are so pronounced and familiar that it would be odd not to recreate them. And after a few years of TV work where you could actually tell what his face looked like, Bertie Carvel returns to his days as a theatrical chameleon with a comic but creepily uncanny impersonation of the 45th President of the United States.