How Harry Potter made me love theatre
With so much drama in those magic books, a theatrical followup made perfect sense
There are blockbuster movies, paperback bestsellers and major albums dropped without any notice. But a play that grabs international attention doesn’t happen very often, maybe once or twice a decade. This year there are two: Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning Hamilton in New York City, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in London.
For a theatre critic, it’s an embarrassment of riches. It’s not often our beat takes over pop culture in the way these two productions have. For Hamilton, the accessibility of its cast recording, which conveys the entire story through an addictive, Top 40worthy mix of show tunes, rap, hip hop and pop has amassed a rabid fan base, and sold out almost every show in New York, Chicago and soon London, too. The vast majority of Hamilton fans, though, still haven’t seen the live production.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has not had such a successful stride into mainstream popularity. While Hamilton has sustained its unprecedented critical and popular buzz, The Cursed Child, a two-part West End stage play that is the eighth installment of J.K. Rowling’s book series, has had its fair share of detractors, beginning with the unfortunate backlash against the casting of Noma Dumezweni, a black actress, as Hermione.
But the major fallout came when the published rehearsal scripts of the two plays, written by Jack Thorne with the story by Rowling, Thorne and the production’s director, John Tiffany, hit the public in late July. Though they sold 2 million copies in two days in the U.S. and Canada, many fans were lukewarm, while others were downright furious or utterly confused.
Readers who weren’t used to a script format were shocked at the lack of detail in the character descriptions. The action moved too quickly, without enough context. Some readers were appalled that Rowling didn’t write the script herself. Others didn’t recognize the characters they had loved as teenage wizards in their middle-aged adult selves. One article on Seventeen.com has the headline “After Reading the ‘Harry Potter’ Series 20 Times, Here’s Why I’ll Never Touch ‘Cursed Child’ Again.”
I am not one of those fans. I was, and am, delighted that the followup to the Harry Potter series — which begins19 years after Harry’s final battle with Voldemort and revolves around Harry’s fraught relationship with his son Albus, Albus’s friendship with Scorpius, the son of Harry’s nemesis Draco Malfoy, and a mysterious rise in dark-magic speculation — is a theatrical play. To me, it makes perfect sense. One of my strongest memories from the sixth grade is a feeling of 11-year-old euphoria. I was standing next to my friend Alyssa during the final recess of the school day that fall. As soon as the school bell rang, our heads snapped towards each other as we uttered in unison: “Harry Potter time.”
Heaven to my11-year-old self is Mrs. Summers, our teacher, reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to our class, and Alyssa being just as excited as I was about it.
Not coincidentally, the sixth grade is also when I started taking drama classes more seriously. In retrospect, I was putting a lot of energy into making reading feel “live” for myself, as if I was an invisible witness to the story playing out right in front of me. Reading was like an acting or directing exercise: How would I say this? What’s going through their heads? What does a spell look like? How would I recreate a Quidditch game?
Even though designated reading time felt juvenile, we couldn’t get enough of Mrs. Summers bringing Harry, Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Dumbledore, even Voldemort to life. Now I realize how much of a performance it was. It was dynamic. It was definitely “live.” And it was something that a group of 11-year-olds uniformly enjoyed together, a group activity that, almost miraculously, broke down the boundaries between social groups when kids can be at their worst.
These books were the icebreaker we needed, and the community we felt huddle around Mrs. Summers eventually broke through to the rest of the day. I don’t remember feeling more connected to a group of classmates as I did during those reading sessions, and not only because we were experiencing the literary phenomenon of our generation.
I believe those reading sessions were a sort of gateway into my current profession as a theatre critic. At the very least, it showed me the power of live storytelling that led to a lifelong love of theatre. Almost daily now, for my job, I join a crowd of people to listen to other people in the same room tell us a story, and it’s still my favourite way to interact with stories and their makers.
The older I got, the more intensely theatrical the Harry Potter craze became. Of course, I thought, when Rowling announced in 2013 that an unexpected eighth installment of the series would take place in the form of a play. It seemed only natural.
My first reaction to the news was a girlish giggle that wouldn’t surface again until the end of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Part One, which I saw earlier this month at London’s Palace Theatre, before gleefully taking in the second installment.
Although I’m a critic, I couldn’t possibly watch the play as an objective audience member. But as a theatre lover and Harry Potter fan, I can say that it felt like an earned, respectful and thrilling revisit to Harry’s magical world, and the closest thing I’ve felt to the thrill of those sixth grade reading sessions since the books first came out.
There was a sense of discovery and surprise, since I didn’t spoil Part Two for myself. But even though I had read Part One, the onstage magic was exhilarating enough to feel like I hadn’t. Without giving too much away, the presence of a specific type of magical creature flying over our heads in the final moments left my eyes and grin wide as can be. As a critic, I’ve gotten used to keeping a straight face in the theatre. This time it was impossible.
The movies are an integral part of the Harry Potter legacy, but in the play, the magic feels real. With the break between Parts One and Two, there’s also plenty of time for predictions and plot analysis. But just as my friends and I were fascinated by the endless possibilities of Harry’s world as kids, we found ourselves obsessed with the idea that it could ever intersect with our own.
I’m still unconvinced that this addition to the fantasy series was ever necessary beyond the potential financial gain for its investors. Despite the obvious production values in both parts of The Cursed Child, this play is a gold mine. Considering the amount of North American accents I heard in the audience at the Palace Theatre, the cost of a plane ticket is no deterrent for determined fans, let alone play tickets that go for up to 140 pounds (about $230 Canadian) for both parts. And now that a New York City production is rumoured for next season, with a potential Toronto run before that, a second line of income is in the works.
When the most disappointing thing to an 11-year-old kid is not receiving an owl-delivered letter of admission to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, then the most satisfying thing would obviously be seeing the magic of Harry Potter live, in front of your own eyes.
It’s watching the tip of a wand light up at the word “Lumos.” It’s seeing people transform into others with Poly juice Potion. And it’s doing so in a gorgeous, gothic theatre pulsing with the excitement of hundreds of fans. Lovely!
The script is a souvenir — the play is the thing.