What you need to know about ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’
Seeing the 2-part play in S.F.? Here’s a refresher of the magical tale
As the Tony and Olivier Award-winning play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” settles in for an open-ended West Coast premiere run at San Francisco’s Curran Theater, most of those going to see it presumably have some familiarity with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books or the movies based on them.
Even so, there are certain to be some muggles — that’s the wizard term for regular humans, oblivious to the magical world — in the audience braving the play entirely unsteeped in Potter lore.
Here’s what they’ll need to get up to speed on specific objects, characters and events referenced in the play. This necessarily involves a few spoilers for the books.
A five-hour play in two parts, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” starts 19 years after the last book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Harry and his friends are in their late 30s with kids of their own. The focus is on Harry’s middle child, Albus.
You might think you could go in fresh with the new generation, but the play references and revisits events from the original seven books frequently.
An orphan raised by his neglectful aunt and uncle, the Dursleys, Harry was a famous wizard before he even knew he was a wizard. As a baby, he miraculously survived the attack by the powerful dark wizard Lord
Voldemort that killed his parents, leaving Harry with a scar and a mental connection to Voldemort.
The books follow Harry year by year at Hogwarts, an ancient boarding school for wizards, as he and friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger continue to fight Voldemort and his followers (“Death Eaters”).
At Hogwarts, a magical
Sorting Hat places students in four houses. The books’ heroes mostly belong to Gryffindor and its villains to Slytherin, though the houses’ attributes are more nuanced. In the play, Albus is assigned to Slytherin and becomes best friends with Scorpius, the kindhearted son of Draco Malfoy, a childhood enemy of Harry’s whose parents were aligned with Voldemort. (Houses Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are barely mentioned in the play.)
Easygoing Ron and ace student Hermione eventually fell in love in the books, and they’re married in the play — as are Harry and Ron’s younger sister, Ginny.
Just as the books are doggedly Harry-centric, so are the names of the couple’s three children. James Sirius is named after Harry’s father and godfather. Albus Severus is named after Harry’s mentor Albus Dumbledore and nemesisturned-protector Severus Snape. Lily Luna is named after Harry’s mother and their friend and classmate
Luna Lovegood.
References fly so fast and furious that you can probably glean some of them from context. Quidditch is a popular sport. Wizards send messages by owls (nobody has a mobile phone). A howler is a screaming magical letter. Floo powder allows travel from house to house through fireplaces. A time-turner is a device for time travel. The Marauder’s Map, created by Harry’s father and his pals while they were at Hogwarts, shows the school’s entire grounds and the whereabouts of everyone there.
Spirits of past headmasters inhabit their portraits and can talk to the living. Various ghosts inhabit the school, including prankster Peeves and weepy Moaning Myrtle.
Dementors are wraiths that feed on souls. Dolores Umbridge was an evil bureaucrat who became headmistress of Hogwarts in the darkest period before the great battle between good and evil.
Much of the plot revolves around an incident in the fourth book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” when Harry and older student Cedric Diggory compete against international wizarding schools in the Triwizard Tournament, and Cedric is killed in one of Voldemort’s evil schemes against Harry.
The play has its own story to tell and gives you most of what you need to go along for the ride. But this quick refresher course should help most of its casual references not just sound like the fake Latin of wizards’ magical spells.