Review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child casts a spell onstage,
Author plays with time in theatrical expansion of Harry Potter universe
LONDON— Oh, for a spell that would allow me to tell you everything and then erase it completely from your memory.
But though I paid rapt attention during Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which opened in this week at the Palace Theatre, I failed to pick up any recipe for post-tell-all amnesia.
This two-part, five-hour-plus sequel to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels is the kind of play you want to describe in detail, if only to figure out how it achieves a magic that is purely theatrical yet channels the narrative grip of Rowling’s prose.
Unfortunately, those who scored tickets, sold out through May, are given buttons as they leave the theatre that admonish “#KeepTheSecrets.” And I do not want to antagonize Potter fans, who tend to be vigilant as the Death Eaters of He Who Must Not Be Named, a.k.a. Lord Voldemort, long gone, of course. Or is he? The Cursed Child — conceived by Rowling with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany — makes such questions impossible to answer. In this work, the past casts a substantive shadow. This play is destined to fight against the memories of readers who want the Boy Who Lived to stay forever as he was.
But playing with time, gleefully and earnestly, is exactly what this show’s creators are doing. Its plot is built on a fantasy most of us indulge: What if we could rewrite our histories?
The notion is well-suited to the The Cursed Child, which allows Potter fans to encounter might-have-been, might-yet-be paths for characters they already know intimately and for new ones introduced.
Yes, the gang is back, or at least those who survived Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Harry (Jamie Parker, who does Potter pain beautifully), now an employee of the Ministry of Magic, and his wife Ginny (Poppy Miller) are at King’s Cross railroad station in London, seeing two of their sons — James (Tom Milligan) and Albus (Sam Clemmett) — off to Hogwarts, the academy of magic that provided him an enlightening, if punishing, education. It will be Albus’s first year, and he is a proud, prickly and sensitive plant.
Joining Harry and company are the goofy Ron Weasley (Paul Thornley, delightful) and perpetual A-student Hermione Granger (Noma Dumezweni, a black actress whose casting provoked controversy but who is perfect in the part), now married and the parents of a Hogwarts-bound Rose (Cherrelle Skeete). Harry’s former archrival, Draco Malfoy (Alex Price), is there with his son Scorpius (Anthony Boyle).
Like Albus, Scorpius is a Hogwarts newbie, and the two seem destined to become best friends, along with Delphi Diggory (Esther Smith). The triumvirate will prove dangerous for pretty much the entire world. Fraught, yearning relationships shape both the play’s form and content.
Who is that cursed child, anyway? More than a few of this story’s many characters fit the description. Like the novels, The Cursed Child is stuffed with arcana-filled plots defying diagrams and baldly wrought sentimental life lessons, along with anguished dives into the tortured solipsism of adolescence.
This production captures Rowling’s sensibility even more than the films. In The Cursed Child, everyone has direct, present-tense responsibility.
And most play many parts, including the show’s principals, though I won’t reveal how and why. Suffice to say these transformations become physical reflections of our desire to connect with the people we think we know, with the dead who linger and the selves we once were and will be.
The word for these leaps of faith is empathy. That’s the magic practised so affectingly in The Cursed Child, and it turns everyone in the audience into a sorcerer’s apprentice.