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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is dense, imaginative, and best seen on stage

By Dan Selcke

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The script book for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a thrilling jolt of imagination from J.K. Rowling, but it’s not a replacement for the real thing.

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This past weekend, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—Parts One and Two was released into bookstores. The stage play of the same name, which catches up with Harry, Hermione, and Ron nineteen years after victory over Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is currently the toast of London—we’re talking about a bound version of the script here.

Cursed Child has been a boon to booksellers everywhere—sales are already through the roof, and the multitude of midnight release parties made it seem like Deathly Hallows was coming out all over again. Booksellers have been billing Cursed Child as “the eighth Harry Potter story,” and fans will be happy to learn that it’s every bit as richly imagined and thematically dense as previous entries in the series. However, even though it’s the eighth Harry Potter story, Cursed Child is not the eighth Harry Potter novel, and readers forget that at their peril.

Simply put, the Cursed Child script book is half an experience. It doesn’t matter how nice it is to catch up with these characters or how charming J.K. Rowling’s ideas are—stage directions can’t compete with the lovingly detailed descriptions from Rowling’s novels, and without actors to read the lines, we can’t know for sure how much impact they’ll have. As long as you realize that going in, you’ll be fine. But if you’re expecting a literary experience on par with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, you were always going to be disappointed. Cursed Child is a play, not a novel—the script is only one part of what makes it tick.

Just close your eyes and think of footlights…but then open them to read. See? It’s not going to work.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the story of Cursed Child, which is something we can assess from the script. Here are a bunch of words that came to mind last night after inhaling the book, which was conceived by Rowling and director John Tiffany but actually written by Jack Thorne: ambitious, emotional, indulgent, powerful, epic, awkward, and dense. Cursed Child is a full-sized experience, and it is not boring. That’s over half the battle right there.

The best thing about Cursed Child is the potency of its emotions. There was always an undercurrent of sadness running under the Harry Potter series, and this play dives right in. Our hero is Albus Potter, Harry’s youngest son, and a new student at Hogwarts when the story begins. Albus doesn’t relate well to his father, and finds himself an outcast at school. The scenes between him and Harry are simple, but tap into universal fears. Harry loves Albus but doesn’t understand him, and Albus wants Harry’s approval but feels small in the shadow of his celebrity. How do parents and children bridge the gap between what they feel and what they think, between what they want and what’s best for them? Rowling explores these questions with her signature sensitivity, and because Harry is a character we’re already invested in from way back when, they have an extra punch.

Intergenerational conflict is at the heart of Cursed Child, just as it was in the original Harry Potter novels. During Harry’s time at Hogwarts, the past always seemed present—he was famous for something that happened over a decade before he arrived at school, and a whole generation of characters was always around to remind him that he was fighting what amounted to the second half of a huge, two-part wizarding war. The same is true of Albus and his best friend, the scene-stealing Scorpius Malfoy, son of Draco. Like most school-age children, they’re trying to carve out identities for themselves, but find that hard to do when there’s so much history pressing down on them. Rowling is very concerned with the idea of the invisible hand of the past controlling the present, and through Albus and Scorpius, that idea gains power and resonance.

That’s not to say that Cursed Child is a navel-gazing bore. The play has some nice thematic heft to is, but the actual mechanics of the plot are pretty zany, with plenty of whimsical humor along the way. (A surreal confrontation with the lady who hands out treats on the Hogwarts Express may take the cake where that’s concerned). Without giving too much away, the central conceit is time travel, which dovetails nicely with the themes. However, it’s here where the limits of the script book format start to show themselves. The time-jumps are elaborately described, but it’s the kind of thing I imagine we’ll have to see on stage to really appreciate.

The same is true of the many special effects sprinkled throughout the script. It’s one thing to read about Voldemort flying through the air in Deathly Hallows, with Rowling’s evocative text helping to paint the picture in our minds. There’s another character who flies in Cursed Child, but the evocative text is absent—it’s up to the stage managers and tech crew to make it convincing, and they don’t come into our living rooms.

I wonder, too, if some of the lines won’t come off better when actors say them out loud. Some of the dialogue is sparkling, but some is clunky. Take this line from Harry, said to a 40-year-old Draco Malfoy about their kids: “We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.” That line just sounds like…well, like a line written by a writer. It comes off as stilted on the page, but in the mouth of the right actor…who knows?

Next: Reviews for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child are mixed

I wasn’t a huge fan of the villain of the piece, either, but it’s hard to gauge just how effective that’ll be without seeing all of the other things that make a play a play: staging, costumes, actors, lights, and the rest. What’s important is that the emotional through line of Cursed Child—the turbulent relationship between Harry and Albus, and between past and present—is sad and touching, joyful and melancholy. Harry Potter comes full circle with this play, from a boy the world had wronged to a man trying not to repeat its mistakes, and his series has come along with him.

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