It’s Harry Potter, all grown up!
Stage version has a magic of its own ... but, boy, it’s long
Harry Potter And The Cursed Child By JK Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany Palace Theatre
GALLOPING goblins, it’s long. The Harry Potter stage show, watched with breaks in one, bot-rotting day, is an eight-hour marathon memorable mainly for its special effects.
Whoosh go jets of flame as the wizards wave their wands in battle. Chairs and broomsticks take on lives of their own, or so it seems. Even the occasional human is somersaulted head over toe, while spooky dementors float down from on high like mournful wraiths.
Potter addicts will love it. JK Rowling is going to make (another) fortune. The West End’s ornate Palace Theatre, itself a little like Hogwarts, has a hit probably for years.
But as the hours passed and the cloaked figures crouched with much penumbral melodrama, there were moments I could have done with a glug of gurdyroot infusion to keep me alert.
Harry Potter And The Cursed Child is a new story in Miss Rowling’s pseudo-gothic saga. It takes up where her last book closed, Harry being now in adulthood and father of Albus.
The son (Sam Clemmett) is initially a wet little pudding, overawed by the prospect of going away to school and living up to his father’s name.
Is he the one who, by bearing that famous surname, is cursed? Or does the cursed child of the title refer to blond Scorpius Malfoy, son of Harry’s old foe Draco? Rumour has it that Scorpius (Anthony Boyle) was sired by the Dark Lord Voldemort. Young Albus, in befriending Scorpius, may be toying with the devil.
Part One of the show, which lasts two-and-three-quarter occasionally glacial hours, opens with a toot of steam train: We are at King’s Cross for the Hogwarts Express. In an early, eye-popping trick, the characters are suddenly seen to be wearing academic gowns. A whisper of ‘how did they do that?’ went round the auditorium.
THE set is framed overhead by the iron arches of a Victorian railway station. Director John Tiffany goes for minimal furniture, the upstage area often kept dark, the better to disguise various sleights of hand and conjured showmanship. Apart from one or two wires and a moment when a stagehand’s hood fell loose, I saw no technical errors.
Some may say that stage effects can never match those in a film but different rules apply. A theatre audience accepts this is about live-performance ingenuity. That brings its own brand of magic.
Jamie Parker is a recognisable Harry, hairdo and glasses and voice similar to those of Daniel Radcliffe in the films. There is similar consistency with the movie version in the portrayals of ginger Ron Weasley (a nasally Estuarine Paul Thornley), a long-bearded Dumbledore, Scots Professor McGonagall and a vast Hagrid (only a couple of appearances by him, alas).
Noma Dumezweni’s Hermione Granger, a little unclear in diction, is nothing like Emma Watson’s portrayal in the films but she works well enough.
Hermione has become Minister for Magic and Harry is one of her deputies.
The plot involves a time-turning machine and an attempt by Albus and Scorpius to rectify a wrong committed 26 years earlier. Trifle with time at your peril, boys and girls. The last thing you want to do is bring back Voldemort!
Along the way we have some soupy stuff about parents needing to hug their children.
Part Two (five minutes shorter than Part One) is easily the zippier. It opens with a dance of baddies and offers repeated blasts of Enya-style music.
If you have a chance to see only one show, go for Part Two. Potter enthusiasts will not mind how long the experience lasts but it seems artistically self-indulgent, and hard on families in terms of time and money, to split the experience into two parts. Hard-nosed editing could surely reduce the content to a single performance.
At the end, the crowd went wild and jumped to their feet – perhaps relieved to have a chance finally to stretch their legs. The actors had certainly earned their corn. Ever onward powers Pottermania.