Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Play script released 2016
Premise - Nineteen years later, the Harry Potter story picks up exactly where it left off, at King's Cross Station with a new generation of Hogwarts students. When Albus Potter, Harry's middle child, gets sorted into Slytherin, he begins a life trajectory of constant disappointment towards his namesakes. Wishing nothing more than to change the past, he and his best friend Scorpius obtain a special time turner that can not only reverse hours, but years.
Review - Dang. I got to see this love, with the original West End/Broadway cast. Let me let that sink in a bit more because it'll never get old to me.
Let's start way back when in time. I went to the midnight release of the script back on July 31st, 2016. I was studying abroad in the U.K. at the time, and though I first picked up the book in Wales the night of the 30th, I spent the 31st in J.K. Rowling's hometown, in Tutshill, England, reading the script for the very first time. I saw her childhood home and took a picture with the Cursed Child book there, on her and Harry's birthday. I was incredibly nervous to read this, because I had very specific ideas of how each of the characters from Harry's generation, Harry especially, would have ended up and I didn't want it to be touched. What I was excited for was to be introduced to new characters, Albus and Scorpius for example, because I had never given their stories much of any thought.
Upon starting to read, I just remember how stressed out I was before the time travel part started (aka before I knew where the plot was headed).
I happened to be vlogging my entire study abroad experience so let me transcribe the mess of thoughts I had once I actually finished reading it on August 1st.
"Reading Cursed Child for the first time was a wild, entertaining ride. It's great if you don't take it very seriously. If you're taking it seriously, then it's like... 'what is this?' It was good for that purpose and it was fun. It was definitely meant to be a play. It's high in entertainment value - it was compared a lot to the Very Potter Musicals because it's just wild and crazy and theatrical but not something to be taken super seriously. It was fun to read for entertainment value, but... it's just a wild ride rather than an eighth story. Because they kind of go in a circle, it's not that much of a story. Which is good, because I was stressed they would give us so much information and J.K. was going to force us to accept it all, but really, very little of it do you actually have to accept because most of the story is undone by the end. It's kind of like those tropes where the character wakes up and it's all a dream.
Some people were reading spoilers and were thinking, 'There's no way the story is that weird. People have to be making this up.' And then you read it and like... no, the story is THAT weird. Like it plays with every fanfiction trope ever.
So Albus and Scorpius are best friends, they're Slytherins, they resent their fathers, and they go back in time with this Time Turner that allows them to go years into the past, and they mess with the past, and it turns into a world where Harry Potter died, there's like Voldemort Day, and like Blood Ball... and like Ron marries Padma at one point and they have a kid named Panju and it's just SO WEIRD. It's so weird. And then, Scorpius is like, 'Oh shoot we messed with the future, we gotta go undo what we did in the past and stop ourselves from messing with time' and then they go back and restore the world to what it once was. That I can accept. The stuff that was harder to accept was when they were not playing with time because then it was permanent. The villain of the story was Voldemort's daughter with Bellatrix which is like... really weird... that was another thing that just felt like fanfiction. So that's how I'd summarize the story is just really weird, but wild and entertaining. So it's probably really great to see it as a play. The play production reviews were amazing. It's just the story reviews were a little bit mixed because, time travel stories are just so hard to get right. It's like Harry Potter meets Back to the Future meets... I don't even know.
So the hardest parts to accept were the ones that had nothing to do with time travel. Like the fact that Astoria dies... they did amazing things with amazing things with Draco and Scorpius's characters. Amazing things. But to have Astoria die... like Draco's been through enough! Like really? And Scorpius loses his mother when he's 13... no... A lot of people probably don't care about that death because they have nothing invested in that character but I did. It was great character development for Draco and for Scorpius, but at the expense of a character they could have done a lot more with. The other thing was Delphi, Voldemort's daughter? Nah. Like what? I guess it would have had to have been Half-Blood Prince time when Bellatrix was pregnant. But... what?
Overall I do accept it as canon as I always do. But it's just going to take some tweaking, a lot of expanding in my mind to work out how it all fits. Overall it's 300 pages but it's in script form so you go through it very, very, very quickly and it covers years with of material so there's a lot that can be expanded upon to make it more realistic and not just so 'what the heck was that?'. Because it was just a crazy story."
So that mess was all verbalized back in 2016, as my first impression. Since then I have, as predicted, wildly expanded on the story in my own mind and made incredible peace with it. I still think the story is weird, no doubt, but what I have become inseparably attached to is the characters. Albus and Scorpius, and Rose somewhat too, were nonexistent in my mind until Cursed Child and now I can't imagine a Wizarding World without them. Delphi, on the other hand... I still have trouble reconciling her existence. Even years later.
So by the time I saw the play, in January 2019, I was incredibly familiarized with and attached to the story. The bias had already sunk in. I don't know what it would have been like to see the play first without having been exposed to the script. I probably would have been wildly confused, as I noticed many audience members were. Especially for Wizarding World novices... they seemed to have no idea what was going on.
One of my now-favorite characters in the Wizarding World is Scorpius Malfoy. The original actor who plays him, Anthony Boyle, has won "Best Actor" awards for his performance, so I was incredibly excited to see him. My impression after seeing the play was the same as my impression after first reading the script.... "WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT??" He spoke like a freakin' gremlin! I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't that. I laughed a lot though. Again, wild, crazy, and entertaining.
The special effects were amazing. We saw magic on stage, and some of the spells I still can't figure out how they pulled off (like Expelliarmus??). Other forms of magic, like the Floo Network and Polyjuice Potion, were easy to see how they pulled off but was just fun to watch. We got to see Dementors fly out into the audience, and the entire stage blacklit, and the stage warp as it goes through time and... I could go on. Production value was phenomenal.
Music was beautiful. It was all done by Imogen Heap, with many of her old songs re-sampled, and I loved it. Bought the soundtrack.
I enjoyed the acting. It's difficult because to me, the film actors for the most part ARE the characters, so when I picture Hermione Granger, I picture Emma Watson, and so on. So to see them represented by other people definitely felt as though I was watching a performance of the character rather than seeing the character him or herself on stage. That level of distance always occurs for me in theater, though. The one character I did feel fantastically moved by was Harry himself. Jamie Parker as Harry was absolutely beautiful. He's still a complicated hero, and a lot of people were upset by how overwhelmingly flawed he is even in adulthood, but I loved him. He's still my favorite character of all time, and I was so happy to see him.
In my original review of the story, I talked about how it was entertaining but not to be taken seriously. That's an opinion that has drastically changed over time. I think what strikes me most about this play and the characters within it, in the end, is the level of emotion. The problem is that certain characters were pushed off into comic relief and entertainment (i.e. Ron and Hermione), but the story of our core characters (Harry, Albus, and Scorpius) had such a powerful emotional weight. There were lots of moments where audiences were gasping, or holding back tears. I teared up at the end.
I think the one of the most powerful lessons of the play is about unconditional love. People make mistakes - all of them - and some of those mistakes can be overwhelmingly horrific and cause very real, very irreversible consequences. Harry still deals with the damage of having been abused at Privet Drive, and still resents Dumbledore for it, even decades later. Of course there is consequence to mistakes. But those consequences NEVER involve being loved any less. Through all of the mistakes, the love between the characters is unconditional.
My default for Harry Potter is to rank it 100/100. It feels weird to give it any less, but obviously it's not as good as the original. I think I just won't rank it.
Quote - "To suffer is as human as to breathe" - Albus Dumbledore
Of course, there are many fantastic Scorpius lines, including but not limited to:
"Mm.. Me. Athletic. Yes."
"HARRY POTTER!! PROFESSOR MCGONAGALLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!"
"My geekness is a-quivering!"
"We're LOSERS! THAT'S WHAT WE DO! WE LOOOOOOSE!"
What to watch for - All of it is beautiful. I don't even know where to start. I fell in love with the musical soundtrack by Imogen Heap. All of the special effects are amazing. I loved how the stage warped every time they traveled through time. Still can't figure out how they did that. I don't know, I loved it all.
If you liked this, I'd recommend the Fantastic Beasts movie series! Also, of course, the A Very Potter Musical trilogy, with a specific nod here to A Very Potter Sequel.
Based on the original story by J.K. Rowling
Written by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany
Directed by John Tiffany
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