When Matt and Ross Duffer, the affable identical twins behind the TV phenomenon Stranger Things, wrote the pilot script for that show, they did not expect it to ever become a West End play. But then that was one of quite a few things that they didn’t foresee almost a decade ago.
For starters, the Duffer Brothers, as they are known and credited, did not expect Stranger Things to exist beyond one season. They envisaged the story as being a “long-form movie” about a child who is mysteriously kidnapped in 1983 and his friends and family who try to get him back. “What would a Stephen King book look like if it were directed by Steven Spielberg,” was the pitch, says Matt now. The giant, spider-like Mind Flayer, Vecna, and even the parallel universe they call the Upside Down, so familiar now to fans after four seasons of the show on Netflix: none of these had yet been imagined.
