Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

It's taken me a while to get around to this, probably longer than it should have, but I have had a few other things to do. Any way, I finally got around to readign Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the rehearsal script for the eighth Harry Potter story. First of all, I really want to see this play just because there are scenes that I do not know how they did on stage. For the most part it is written as a stage script with great attention to how it can be on stage, but every now and then it appears that J.K. Rowling jumped in with some old school hard core magic with no regard to how it could actually happen on stage, and the fact that the trolley witch could transfigure claws, polyjuice potions could change actors, engorgement charms could be cast to make people inflate, dementors could suck out misty souls and witches can levitate, all on stage, just the effects, even the attempt to make them with this being the final draft, would be well worth the price of admission.

The story begins exactly where it left off with the epilogue from th Deathly Hallows. What changes is that the point of view shifts to Albus Potter, Harry's young heir on his first trip to Hogwarts. He meets Scorpio Malfoy on the train, the son of Draco Malfoy. What follows is very interesting as rather than history repeating itself with the Potter Malfoy feud carrying on to the next generation, the two become very good friends. The story then skips through to their third year where all of the action takes place. In their first two years the boys have bonded, not just in spite of their heritage, but in large part because of it. Both boys carry heavy burdens because of their fathers, and even though this should make them enemies, it gives them empathy for each other's plight. Scorpio is actually the nicer one, the end of a line of dark wizards he has had enough and just wants a friend. Albus is coming at it from another angle, he has two older siblings, famous parents, a famous aunt and uncle and two cousins that all make the family legacy clear and his middle name is Severus after Snape, the Half-Blood Prince, and he has also had enough and just wishes he didn't have to deal with all of this. Albus is even more complicated because he ends up in House Slytherin, but nobody, not even Albus himself, sees that he was meant to be there for no other reason than to be friends with Scorpio.

After Cedric Diggory's father bad mouths Harry and mentions an illegal time turner, Albus gets the crazy idea that he can use the time turner to save Cedric and make the world better. He gets the time turner but ends up making things worse, first inadvertently breaking up Hermione and Ron to make sure his cousins are never born, then saving Cedric but getting Harry killed to create a dark world where Voldemort rules and Albus is never born. Scorpio is then tasked briefly with settign time right but subtly stepping in and countering the spells they used the first time to allow time to return to normal. By the end of Act 3 everything is set right but then a surprise enemy comes along who actually wanted time changed and is not at all happy about Scorpio fixing time.

The narrative is kind of twisty, but it does allow for important scenes to play out on stage while also telling us what happened to our favorite characters. For the most part, the OGs seem to be consistent with who they were, while the new characters fit in the story in a believable way showing the touch of J.K. Rowling making sure the story stays true to it's roots. It's nice to see how everyone is doing, though in the middle it's jarring to see everything undone, even if only temporarily. Strangest of all is how this story was only released in script format, so unless you can actually attend a stage production, reading the book that has been released to the public makes for an awkward read, at least at first. The stage directions made me think of a stage production, sterile, quiet and with an unbroken but definitive fourth wall. Eventually I got used to it and I was able to read the story within the same reality of the first seven books, it helped alot once they got to the third year. The first few scenes skip through the the first two years at an uneven and accelerated pace, but once they hit the htird year, the pace settles down and as events unfold at a slower pace, the format relaxes into a dialogue that tells a good story. It's like if you never knew Harry Potter and were introduced to it with the Prisoner for Azkaban with a synopsis of the first two books hastily scrawled on the fly page, once you get past that awkward exposition, the story plays out quite well. This is probably best for Harry Potter fans or aspiring playwrights, anybody else is going to be flustered by how awkward the whole thing is, but for those of us who can decode this mess, it's a wonderful ride, not to be missed.