Sticking to the script
SHE has spent months imploring fans to “keep the secrets”, unveiling her Harry Potter theatre show under the tightest security and entreating fans not to peek at internet spoilers.
But it appears JK Rowling need not have worried, as the script behind
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child became the publishing sensation of the decade last night after enjoying record pre-sales.
Rowling, who attended a special gala performance of the play yesterday, said she had been “amazed” by its “extraordinary” fans, who had chosen not to look up the plot online to avoid “spoiling it for each other”.
Bookshops were last night preparing for scenes not witnessed since Rowling’s last Potter novel was published, when the script for Harry Potter and
the Cursed Child was officially released with a host of midnight openings.
They have already reported unprecedented pre-sale orders, with Waterstones alone going well into six figures in a market where 50,000 books is considered “astonishing”.
While fans of the Potter franchise will have been familiar with midnight book queues back in 2007, the frenzy is all the more remarkable in 2016 for the fact the script’s plot has been available online for weeks.
Ever since the Palace Theatre previewed the show last month fans have been able to share the story. And while the mainstream media has strenuously avoided spoilers, online forums have combed over the plot and shared a major twist.
Speaking at the world premiere of the play – which was attended by celebrities such as David Baddiel, the comedian, Laura Carmichael, left, the actress, and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London – Rowling said the success of the Keep the Secrets campaign had been “incredible”, as producers revealed fans had ignored online spoilers to preserve the mystery for themselves.
“It’s the most extraordinary fandom so I’m kind of not surprised, because they didn’t want to spoil it for each other,” said Rowling. “But I’m so happy we got here without ruining everything.”
When asked what she hoped the play would achieve, she said: “What we’d really like most of all is to bring people in who’ve never been to the theatre before. I’d be so proud to think that kids from my kind of background, who didn’t come from particularly theatregoing families, learned what theatre is all about through the show. That would be incredible.” Sonia Friedman, one of the Cursed
Child producers, said the script had already become the “biggest selling play of all time, by many hundreds of thousands, if not millions”.
“What we think is beautiful about that is we’re imagining children, families, creating the play themselves in their living rooms and bedrooms using their imaginations,” she said.
When asked whether the play would now go to Broadway, even after extending its London run by another quarter of a million tickets, Friedman said: “Hopefully more than America. Hopefully many countries at some point will get to see it.”
Readers in Hogwarts school uniform and brandishing wands queued for hours last night to receive their script copies, with 20 and 30-somethings who grew up with the books leading the way or introducing their own children to the franchise.
In a departure from the earlier book releases, the script will be available to download on e-reader immediately, and has been in Amazon’s Kindle chart since it was announced earlier this year. The physical book is number one on the book chart, with 4.5 million copies already printed in the United States and hundreds of thousands more in the UK.
Experts said it was the best-selling book since Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows, with only Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s surprise prequel to To Kill
a Mockingbird, coming close.