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J.K. Rowling and the Cursed Child producers break down the play

By Dan Selcke

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J.K. Rowling, playwright Jack Thorne, and director John Tiffany break down Harry Potter and the Cursed Child as it begins a run of previews.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play that will continue the adventures of Harry, Ron, and Hermione where we left them at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will open in London on July 30, with previews starting before that.

The three creative forces behind the play—playwright Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany, and Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling—sat down with The Guardian for a massive interview. They were careful not to reveal any spoilers, but they talks about pretty much everything else.

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And maybe they revealed a couple of spoilers, too. This is as close as Rowling got to describing the play’s story:

"The epilogue of the seventh book is a very clear pointer as to where I was interested in going. It’s very obvious from that epilogue that the character I was most interested in was Albus Severus Potter. And you see Scorpius on that platform."

You’ll have to make do with that for now, Potter fans. Incidentally, Rowling is hoping that the theatergoers who see Cursed Child in previews won’t spoil it for others, but “[w]e’re not going to be throwing tantrums” if word gets. That a good attitude to take, because the possibility that nothing will leak during previews seems like a guarantee, considering how hot the tickets are.

The popularity of the show, while expected, is something that Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany are all very pleased with. “The phrase John hates more than any other is ‘I should go to the theatre more often’ because it contains the idea that going to the theatre is an obligation,” said Thorne. “And that is the death of theatre. This is an opportunity, I guess, to get people who don’t feel they should go to the theatre to go to the theatre, and then discover that they want to go to the theatre.”

In other words, the trio are hoping that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child does for theater what Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone did for reading. Here’s hoping.

LONDON, ENGLAND – JUNE 07: A general view of The Palace Theatre as previews start today for ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ on June 7, 2016 in London, United Kingdom. The play has a sold out run until May 2017 with fans expected to fly to London from all over the world to see it. (Photo by Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images)

Rowling loves the theater, and while she’s often asked to adapt existing Harry Potter stories into other mediums (“I hate musicals,” she offered), nothing spoke to her until producer Sonia Friedman suggested a theater project, a project that eventually turned into Cursed Child. “I think that, as a theatrical experience, as a play, it will be unlike anything people have seen before,” she said. “And once people have had this theatrical experience, they will understand why this was the perfect medium for the story.”

The other reason she took on the project is because in gave her an opportunity to work with Thorne and Tiffany, whose careers she was familiar with. (Oddly enough, she’d met Tiffany by chance back in the ’90s when she was writing the first Harry Potter book in cafes in Edinburgh). “I thought I will never have the opportunity to work with such great people again,” she said.

The three do seem very close, laughing and joking with each other throughout the interview. They’ve been working on Cursed Child for two years, but their connection goes deeper, as Rowling explains:

"Jack [Thorne] and I are similar in many ways. We’re both, notwithstanding how chirpy we are being right now, quite introverted people who are very happy alone in a room, and there are many parallels in our working practices and I felt like he was one of my tribe."

It surely helped that Thorne was a self-confessed “total Potterhead,” but the connection also seems based on the fact that all three people share an understanding that growing up can be difficult and sad. “When you’re growing up it’s very easy to feel lonely and insecure,” said Tiffany. “And what Jo managed to capture, I think, was a world which made those people feel less lonely.” I remind you at this point that Rowling has said that Cursed Child will make audiences cry. These quotes seem to back that up.

Next: Why Rowling didn't write the script herself, casting controversy, and more

Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany also touched on the casting controversy that cropped up after it was announced that black actress Noma Dumezweni would be playing an adult Hermione. Unsurprisingly, Rowling was unimpressed. “With my experience of social media, I thought that idiots were going to idiot,” she said (someone should put that on a bumper sticker). “But what can you say? That’s the way the world is. Noma was chosen because she was the best actress for the job. When John told me he’d cast her, I said, ‘Oh, that’s fabulous’ because I’d seen her in a workshop and she was fabulous.”

Tiffany wasn’t as prepared for the online backlash.

"I am not as Twitter familiar as Jo and Jack, so I hadn’t encountered its dark side, which is just awful. The anonymity breeds horrors so after a while I stopped reading it. But what shocked me was the way people couldn’t visualise a non-white person as the hero of a story. It’s therefore brilliant that this has happened."

Another question: why did Rowling, who’s no stranger to writing, not pen the script for Cursed Child herself?

"I am not so arrogant that I think when you’ve got an absolutely top-class playwright offering to do it that I’m going to say, ‘Well, I’ve never done it before but I’ll do it.’ It’s a question of knowing the limits of your own competence. I was reasonably involved in the Potter scripts. I’m more familiar with that world. I felt a degree of confidence writing a screenplay but I had supreme confidence that Jack was going to write the play that I was going to love and he has. So you can’t ask fairer than that."

The screenplay she’s referring to is the one for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which will open in theaters this November and make 2016 the post Potter-tastic year in a long time. Is there a particular reason it took Rowling this long to return to this world? Apparently not—it just sort of worked out that way.

"It was 17 years and just because I’ve stopped on the page doesn’t mean my imagination stopped. It’s like running a very long race. You can’t just stop dead at the finishing line. I had some material and some ideas and themes, and we three [she nods at Tiffany and Thorne] made a story…I carry that world around in my head all the time. I am never going to hate that world. I love that world. But there are other worlds I want to live in too. To be perfectly honest, I just feel if I enjoy it, I’ll do it – and if I don’t, I won’t."

One final question before we wrap up: why did the producers choose to break Cursed Child up into two plays? From a distance, it might seem like they’re trying to cash in on what’s sure to be a popular show, but Tiffany disagreed. “Where film can eat up story, theatre needs space and breath,” he said. “Once we thought of doing it in two parts, it felt naughty to begin with, but we felt we didn’t want to short change the story.” Thorne chimed in as well. “You would have had no space for character,” says Thorne. “It would just have been plot, plot, plot.”

Next: Plot for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child leaked?

Very soon, we’ll see the results of Rowling, Thorne, and Tiffany’s hard work. Tiffany calls the play “absurdly ambitious theatrically,” so expectations are high. July 30 can’t get here soon enough.

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