- Harry potter and the cursed child book preview full#
- Harry potter and the cursed child book preview series#
Now, apply that logic to our modern context: It's easy to argue that Albus's plight of living up to his father's name is a burden, a misfortune, a bane, even a plague - but a curse? I'm grasping here, but the word has been imbued with too much death and malady in the Potter series for it to be used here to describe what's basically just a bad case of teenage angst. A curse is dark magic - meant to be harmful, malicious, and even unforgivably deadly - and it's not a word Rowling has tossed around lightly in her writing. Traditionally, Rowling only ever mentions them with extremely negative connotation. There are some creepy dementors that waft out over the audience, minus, at least from the upper seats, the cold draft that generally accompanies them.Why he's not: Consider, for a moment, the history of how curses have been used in the Potter series. There is magic, right onstage, including some books that fly from a bookshelf and speak to us a dexterous use of fireplaces as pieces of the wizarding transportation network and an amusing wand fight in which a pair of wizards fling curses at one another. Albus Dumbledore himself appears, in a painting that speaks to us, as paintings do in Potter-world, followed by as good an explanation as you’ll ever hear of why we should not mistake a portrait for an actual person. The tantalizing question arises of what might or might not happen to the present if you try to tamper with the past. In any case, we will try to keep it vague.)Įxciting scenes feature, among others, the Sorting Hat (wittily staged) the grumpiest of the centaurs, who is extra grumpy this time around the evil Dursleys and one of the book’s more diabolically unpleasant characters, who turns up at the end and whom we had hoped we had seen the last of. (NOTE: People who don’t want to find out what happens until July 31, when the text of the play is to be published, might want to disapparate out of their seats for the next two paragraphs.
And then we get to learn the thing that most drives every fan in these situations: What happens next? She then rushes rapidly forward a few years, and shoots off into all sorts of unexpected directions.
Rowling does: She thrusts us back into that concluding scene, making it the first scene of the play and putting us on Platform 9¾ as the characters wait for the Hogwarts Express. How exciting, when you’ve just reread “Deathly Hallows” and been reminded of what happened, to see what Ms.
We had to readjust our sense of their reality, and replace what had been in our imagination with what the author put in front of us. Rowling worked her mischief, in their old familiar ways.įor those of us in the audience, it was jarring to see the reanimation of characters we thought had been put to rest, who in our minds had been suspended forever in time and place. Here onstage were all the characters we’d come to know so intimately: Harry, now married to Ginny Weasley Hermione and Ron, now married to each other and behaving, at least until Ms.
Harry potter and the cursed child book preview full#
But though it is full of new difficulties for its famous protagonist, “ Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which had its first preview in the West End in London on Tuesday, felt like an author sending a Valentine to her longtime fans. Now Harry is back - in a play, this time - and we have to reconsider the whole thing. His life, marked in part by violence, danger and grief, seemed to have settled down, and those of us who had worried about him through so many pages for so many years felt relieved at his apparently happy ending. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” he was a middle-aged wizarding bureaucrat sending his second child, Albus Severus, off to Hogwarts for the first time. LONDON - When we last left Harry Potter, in the final pages of J.