by Brendan Foley
When it was announced that J.K. Rowling was collaborating with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany to produce a stage play that would act as an official, canonical eighth Harry Potter story, I was of two minds.
One mind responded with, “NEW HARRY POTTER NEW HARRY POTTER NEW HARRY POTTER GIMME GIMME GIMME!”
The other mind, in a quieter voice, wondered, “But do I really want more Harry Potter?”
Bear in mind, I hold the original seven Harry Potter books in a place of almost holy reverence. Growing up reading those books year by year, getting older as the series got progressively darker, remains one of the formative pop cultural experiences in my life. No other series, not Star Wars, not Lord of the Rings, not any of the Marvel characters or films, possess the same power over me as Harry, Ron, Hermione, and all their assembled friends and enemies.
I can still remember the day the seventh book came out. My brother and I woke up early in the morning and high-tailed it to the local supermarket, which we had been told would be loaded with copies of The Deathly Hallows. Sure enough, we slid right through the sliding doors to find a table loaded high with big thick books, containing the final battle between Harry and Lord Voldemort. We each bought a copy and rushed home, then spent the remainder of that sunny summer day perched on our porch, turning the pages with almost mechanical rhythm.
Then and now, there remains criticism of Rowling’s epilogue, which finds Harry, Ron, and Hermione all happy and successful and ready to send their own kids off to Hogwarts. It was too happy, some complained, to total a victory that had pushed so far into utter darkness and moral compromise.
Then and now, I adored the epilogue, and have felt nothing but gratitude that Rowling delivered Harry and his friends from that darkness. Harry Potter is not blind to the petty cruelties of the world, but the series refuses to accept that these cruelties must be the order. Beneath Rowling’s acidic satire of nationalism and racial pride beats the heart of a true idealist and romantic.
So I was happy with Harry having a happy ending and was somewhat dismayed to learn that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child would feature a Harry Potter who is middle-aged, overworked, and harried (natch) by the demands of raising three school-age children.
Thankfully, Rowling, Tiffany, and Thorne have pulled off another magic trick. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a beautiful extension of the original saga, and one that acts as a very wry commentary on how a new generation of readers will react to growing up in a world where Harry Potter is ingrained into the fabric of life.
(If you want to know absolutely nothing about the plot, stop reading here. I won’t get into any actual spoilers, but there may be details you’d rather discover on your own)
Cursed Child picks up exactly where Deathly Hallows left off, with Harry and Ginny Weasley sending their kids off to Hogwarts at Platform 9 3/4. But Cursed Child follows the kids onto the train, where Harry’s younger son, Albus, runs into Scorpius Malfoy (son of Draco) and the two strike up an immediate friendship. The play speeds through time, showing Harry and Albus growing further and further apart as Harry has no idea what to do with a son who seems to be drowning in the pressure of having to be Harry Potter’s son.
When Harry recovers a time-turner (a handy little time-travel device), Albus sees a chance to re-write history right, which promptly causes all hell to break loose on the wizarding world.
And Harry’s scar begins to hurt again.
Praise must go first and foremost to Thorne, who quickly demonstrates that he simply gets these characters. It was nerve-wracking to sit down with a Harry Potter story that didn’t come from Rowling’s pen, but within moments you sink back into the rhythms of the magical world and the bone-dry wit that added so much color to the original books.
Thorne nails the core trinity (Harry, naturally heroic but too quick to temper; Ron, steadfast comic relief; Hermione, way more badass than everyone else and it’s not even close), and there are many returning faves that I’m sure will have Potter fans the world over giddy with delight to see again.
As much fun as it is to see new adventures for the old characters, these moments start to feel overly victory lap-ish, especially because the story really sings when Thorne dials in on the new(er) characters. The friendship between Albus and Scorpius underscores the entire story, and just reading their banter is delightful, never mind how much it must pop when performed live by kids with real chemistry. Albus is profoundly unlikable at times (in much the same way that Harry Potter was often a drag on the Harry Potter series) but Thorne’s script is sure to underline that his worst moments come from places of profound pain and confusion.
Since Deathly Hallows ended, I’ve been curious how future generations would respond to Harry Potter. Part of why my generation responded to it so strongly is that we literally grew up with it. When we were little, the first books were fun and funny magical romps with isolated moments of true melancholy (and terror. Fucking basilisk). As we got older, the books that were released grew darker as death stalked our beloved characters, and that melancholy threatened to overwhelm the whole enterprise. From the moment Cedric Diggory dropped dead, the series pivoted to a bleaker, more mature worldview that suited us perfectly as we moved through adolescence.
(That’s a big part of why that epilogue meant so much to me. It was a promise that you could survive the darkest moments of your youth and find something beautiful on the other side.)
But new readers wouldn’t have that same progression. They will have all seven books and all eight movies at their disposal right from the jump. Could the journey possibly mean the same thing to an audience that might speed through all seven books (and all eight movies) in a month or two?
Rather than sit idly by and let other people determine these answers, Rowling, Tiffany and Thorne have crafted a story that very specifically deals with exactly this. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is about what it means to live in a world where the shadow of Harry Potter cannot be escaped. The kids at the center of the story have heard all the same stories that we have, and they have many of the same questions and frustrations with how things played out that I’m sure many people have voiced to Rowling.
In many ways, Cursed Child acts as a corrective to some of the most nagging questions remaining from the series. If Hermione has a time travel device in Prisoner of Azkaban, why wouldn’t they use it to undo some of the major deaths over the years (YOU COULD HAVE SAVED FRED, YOU MONSTERS)? Does getting placed into Slytherin automatically make you evil? And for a series concerned always with the importance of choice and free will, it sure seems like certain kids are born into pre-disposed morality, with ‘good’ kids from ‘good’ families battling ‘bad’ kids from ‘bad’ families.
Cursed Child tackles these issues head on, and the result is a story that refines and deepens the world of Harry Potter, adding shades of grey and new understandings to old characters. I certainly want to re-read every moment with Draco Malfoy over again, as Cursed Child does wonders with humanizing that pasty little shit.
More than anything, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child seems like proof positive that this series will thrive and survive no matter how much time passes or what format it takes place in. I have no idea how you stage the magic described in this script (I imagine the answer is: expensively), but even without Rowling’s prose painting the scene, Harry Potter remains Harry Potter. Returning to the wizarding world feels a lot like being embraced by an old friend. So long as Rowling is willing and she is working with storytellers as talented and dedicated as Tiffany and Thorne, I hope to return again many, many times.
