If Harry Potter is a fairytale, The Cursed Child is its Into The Woods.
In Boyhood, Mason Jr visits the launch of Half Blood Prince when he’s 9. Not only was it a moment so many of my (in fact, many) generation(s) can recognise, but for Linklater’s tale of time passing it’s a canny comparison – we watch Mason grow up in the same way Mason watches Harry grow up, in the same way we all saw Harry grow. Latecomer mentioned reading them to her children – she’s certainly not alone there, that’s how my brother and I were read the novels too! With Harry Potter saga, Rowling (more visually in the movies, but nevertheless very much so still in the novels) took her characters on a similar track to Linklater – the reason this was the series no-one gave up on was because the characters aged before our eyes, alongside us, covering seven years of teenage life as opposed to merely seven fantastical adventures (the adventures didn’t hurt, mind, but we came for the adventure and stayed for the puberty). And so it goes on. The Cursed Child is to The Deathly Hallows what The Deathly Hallows was to The Philosopher’s Stone – the same story, only adjusted for age, à la Boyhood. Returning to these characters ten years/nineteen years later, The Cursed Child is a surprisingly adult, continuingly dark saga. It’s a sensitive, comprehensive and even psychological reunion with our fictional friends, and reappraisal of what came before; this is why The Cursed Child is a beautiful piece of theatre, and the perfect continuation/conclusion of the novels.
“All was well”. Thus ends Cinderella, and Rapunzel, and Jack and the Beanstalk, yet such drama and insight and humanity is found when looking at what a ‘happy ending’ is when morality is grey where it seemed black and white, where difficult journeys cannot have simple ends, and where everyone ends up happy, though happily ever after remains to be seen. And so to Into the Woods, a profound and poignant putting away childish things and becoming a man, and a serious study of how happy endings are merely happy intermediate-conclusions. And what do we learn from Sondheim’s great work? Witches can be right, giants can be good. Careful the things you say, children will listen. And, of course, no-one is alone.
“All was well” – well, another story ends that way too. My primary emotion going into The Cursed Child was – as it seems to have been for a lot of you (been away, only just catching up on two months of theatreboard, wish me luck!) – fear. Seven books, eight films, we had our happy ending. Wasn’t that that? Drama doesn’t come from people being ‘well’, but quite the opposite; was Rowling going to go back on her word, to force drama where none need occur, to undermine those three simple words? No, what Rowling has done (the Thorney script is indisputably Rowling’s story) is to cannily create an addendum to that. This adventure (a very fun, very exciting adventure) is window dressing an exploration of the reality of living a fantasy life, a chance to look at the consequences of childhood playtime. Albus’ story is about wanting better from the past and more from the future, of having expectations that can never be met, and wanting simply a good relationship with your parents. Harry’s story is about what happens when heroes grow up, when you can’t be Peter Pan and have to be Peter Llewelyn-Davies (what a subject for a play, eh?). Going back to Hogwarts rather suggests notions of romanticism and nostalgia or perhaps that Welsh idea of hiraeth. Going back to Godrick’s Hollow takes us to reality, regret, trauma. Between these two extremes sits The Cursed Child.
The Harry of The Cursed Child is a lovely grown-up. Firstly, he’s clearly the Harry of seven other books, grown more normal with time. Mostly, though, it’s the way he has to be normal that makes him special. That last line, “All was well”, was a significant choice of words. “Well” is not “happy”; “well” is not “wrapped-up”; “well” is, well, “well”, content at best. And how could a life like Harry’s – from abused child to child star to child soldier – be happy or wrapped-up, given all he went through? To not just age up our hero, but to turn him into a worry-wart with nightmares of wetting himself and doubts of his worth as a father, well, it’s takes Harry down many many pegs after seven novels of eulogizing, down to the uncomfortable levels of you or I. It’s a great decision to see the abuse of the Dursleys as abuse, not the children’s lit cliché of orphan life being great. It’s a greater decision to see Harry genuinely struggle with many types of survivor guilt, and show Harry knowing that the pain in his head is not some external, expeliarmus-able antagonist, but his own invincible inner life. It’s the greatest decision to then have adult Harry struggling with something so ordinary as fatherhood. Where Rowling could have contrived some unnecessary adventure to bring Harry back, it’s better that his great conflict now is not noseless nemeses but simply the question of how to say to your child in the night that nothing’s all black but nothing’s all white, how do you say it will all be all right when you know that it might not be true? Draco’s worth bracketing in here too, actually – how wonderful to make the tertiary protagonist the former tertiary antagonist, making a hero of him by merely domesticating him. Witches can be good, Malfoys can be good. Possibly the most affecting moment was his simple admission that all he wanted in life was to be happy – it’s a line of therapeutic self-knowledge which truly breaks your heart. Draco and Harry’s begrudging but well-earned friendship is a lovely mirror to the easy and loving relationship of their sons.
Incidentally, Jamie Parker IS Harry – little things in how he walks out, holds himself, has his hair – it just is Harry. His demeanour, laid-back but lost in his past, IS Harry. Parker’s wonderful; always is, always will be, absolutely is here.
We’ll return to Harry in a second, for now let’s turn to future slash-fiction stars Albus and Scorpius. Thorne had a very hard task on his hands – write a Harry Potter play where Harry’s a bit of a bore, and our heroes instead are rank strangers and have six hours to endear themselves to us as Harry had over a decade to do – and yet, lo and behold, if Scorpius particularly isn’t a fan favourite there’s no justice in the world, and both are wonderful protagonists to bring us back to the Wizarding World. Even from the off, there’s something moving about a Malfoy and a Potter bonding at all, let alone so strongly (perhaps their characters work well because they’re new after a decade, not despite, given the baggage we’ve brought to them – again, the idea of hatchet-burying and the ridiculousness of grudges is there through this friendship), but both are wonderfully realised as new people, new characters, new friends. In part, that’s because of the spectacularly, unapologetically uncool performances by Sam Clemmett and Anthony Boyle, making these characters whose nerdy charisma instantly attracts us audience (someone, I think Sebastian Faulks, once said that an author can instantly get a reader on/offside by making his characters readers or not, as readers ourselves it’s an instant link – Scorpius in particular being an intellectually successful and intellectually happy purveyor of nerd culture makes him an instant hero). Much as I’m banging on about the substance of the play being a fascinatingly revisionist take on the Potter legacy, the real reason it works is plain and simple – these two new characters are great, we love them, and we enjoy their adventure.
Through this friendship (lovely in writing, beautiful in their performances), Thorne and Rowling are true to much/most of what we loved about Harry Potter in the early days. Albus and Scorpius are troublemakers, they’re intellectuals, they’re scamps, they’re wits. Having our cake and eating it, we do get an adventure amidst the highfalutin human touches, and that’s through these two and Thorne. There is genuine jeopardy in a way never quite felt in books 1-6 – here, Harry could die in any duel at this stage in his life/narrative, as frankly could the children too. There’s also still the fun we had during the early books, of japes and adventures with Albus and Scorpius. Contrarian/easily-pleased, I felt that Delphi became a rather impressive villain as the piece built up, her villainy unexpected, and the fourth act thwarting her was edge-of-your-seat stuff. But in act four, literally returning to the past and the most awful moment in Harry’s life, adventure takes a back seat as contemplation and family comes forwards. Worse than Delphi is self-doubt, fear, guilt, and shame; with the adventure taking us into the past, so too Thorne looks back on Harry’s awful childhood and doubtful future, and Albus’ living with this legacy and wanting something more. In the church, where the father/son narrative meets, Rowling and Thorne move this to moving territory about moving forwards, making it maybe the most important chapter in the saga.
Time travel, and the Constellations-y multiverse exploration, is the only way Rowling can both indulge our adventurous inner children and explore the ‘well’ adult world. As utilised here, it’s a wonderful narrative work. It’s not, in fact, fanfic, nor ‘terminator territory’ (nor the subculture of Harry/Terminator fanfic which apparently exists, oh brave new world that has such people in it). Admittedly, though, the peculiarities of all time travel narratives still hold – i.e. quelle coincidence that in every permutation of reality Scorpius was Scorpius born same time same place same upbringing same conception one assumes – but why split hairs? It’s the perfect way to continue this contemplation of the past, to literally visit regrets and traumas. Before we reach the church and those deaths, The Cursed Child has taken some stunning steps. There’s a real narrative audacity in not just killing off Harry but changing the entire ending therein; there’s a narrative audacity in bringing back someone like Snape, whose death had such significance; there’s a narrative significance in taking a story so set in stone and stomping over its canon to make a point. None of these audacities would work without a certain weight to how they’re dealt with; some of that is wrapped up in act four, but much is raised along the way. Bringing Snape back doesn’t feel like a tokenistic fan-favourite cameo, but quite the painful opposite – a reminder of the reality and finality of his death, and an acceptance of a greater good (and gosh, what a moving line Snape's is about Albus bearing his name, getting teary now). Brining Hagrid back, I felt, brought his story to a circle – as Hagrid held Harry, I thought of Harry hugging Hagrid after the Battle of Hogwarts, and the endurance of the relationship brought a tear to my eye. As for actually going so far as to kill off Harry: that felt not only sacrilegiously shocking, but tantamount to killing off George Bailey, and that movie touched upon some rather serious themes too.
And after all this, getting into Godrick’s Hollow’s church and causing the Potter’s deaths... After three acts which a) say very clearly that death is bad, that even fictional wars have unnecessary victims, and it is good and right to try and save lives, and b) say very clearly that one always must put others first, this is a moment that goes to the heart of Harry Potter and Harry Potter, and devastates our emotions as it does so. We’ve seen Snape acknowledge that his life is sacrifice worth making and make it twice, we’ve seen Hermione and Ron suffer and die for a better, alternate world; we’ve seen Scorpius squander some happiness for him for more happiness for all; those are nothing compared to this (especially with that sparse stage, watching Harry watch Voldemort is horrible). Watching Harry become a tantamount-accessory to his parent’s murder, and make a sacrifice with the bed-wetting self-doubting bad-parenting unheroic consequences...
So, a word on the final few moments, the Albus/Harry dialogue. It’s imperfect, it’s unhappy, it’s full of shame and regret and denial. But how human! After everything we’ve seen, the act of trying to be a family, the act of accepting the world at its worst, the act of simply going on – even after seven books of adventure and six hours of time travel, this is real heroism. Now we have put down childish things, just living in an imperfect world with imperfect families and imperfect lives is the real victory. Adulthood, fame, guilt, work. Childhood, parenthood, family. Narratively, the adventure we watch is one big 360 degree turn around. Thematically, however, this ending is a human addendum to The Deathly Hallows’s happy ending – explaining what true heroism is, and what living "well" has to mean.
Enough time has passed in the real world to now treat the Harry Potter phenomenon with a pinch of salt and degree of scepticism (whilst still un-hypocritically enjoying it wholly, of course). The dual narrative of The Cursed Child does this for us, Rowling becoming her own Bettleheim and Thorne her respective Sondheim. It’s a wonderful work of theatre, and whilst some lines are clearly Rowling’s own, all credit for the theatrical strength of this goes to Thorne. I still think the basic adventure Scorpius and Albus go on is fun enough in and of itself, but the life adult Harry leads is that not of Peter Pan or Paddington Bear, but of you or I; in taking us down this narrative path – of paperwork and bills and getting parenting wrong – Rowling has not butchered her happy ending, but broadened it, domesticated it, humanised it.
The funny thing is, thus far I’ve written predominantly about the play, about the narrative, about the script. I’ve read the script since, natch, and I think it works wonderfully as a book (not least some very evocative stage directions, Thorne writes so readably) and I hope non-theatre-going-readers will get this much out of the story and dialogue alone. As a piece of theatre, though, WOW, and yet what discipline. I’ve said before that my favourite moment of His Dark Materials was not witches flying or bears fighting, but of the puppeteer removing his mask and Samuel Barnett becoming death. I don’t think I’m alone in saying my favourite piece of staging here was the moving staircases, a moment without light and magic but basic staging. Tiffany’s staging does have more WOW moments than perhaps anything I’ve seen, more “How did that happen?” conversations afterwards, but what’s wonderful is that they’re narratively led, Tiffany putting meretricious show-offery to one side unless it’s needed – and blimey, many moments, particularly the dementors, and PARTICULARLY disappearing into that phonebox, simply had to be actual factual magic to happen. One has to respect Tiffany for not overdoing this, for not turning it into merely a magic show. As I say, the WOW moments were plentiful and amazing, but they were very, very sensitively employed.
And I just realised how much I’m underselling the staging. Blimey, there were moments and a half. Really, truly, WOW WOW WOW.
And on the stage side of things, Noma Dumezweni is as much Hermione as Jamie is Harry. She has a cheek and a sarcasm which ages the character nicely, and Dumezweni always has a natural, fierce, magical intelligence – she’s naturally Hermione. Similarly Thornley has Ron’s gangly awkwardness even when fighting a rebellion, and Alex Price feels very much like (hello to) Jason Isaacs in how he does Draco. Poppy Miller is also absolutely wonderful as Ginny – slightly fleshing out that character works wonders, given how poorly the movies sidelined her and how the books never offered us the bogstandard scenes of togetherness where Harry and Ginny’s attraction could grow (her little speech about exploding snap – for all that the staging was magical, it really was the little things that made this special).
Oh, and the fact that someone in the canon finally used FLIIIIIIIIIIPENDO! is the best bloody part of this all.
Without being too portentous about this family-friendly franchise, there was something special about the way Rowling aged the series, taking Harry from precocious child hero to a true young adult. Harry Potter may have begun with the twinkly child-friendly chimes of John Williams, but it ended with the abattoir blues of Nick Cave (fab music here, BTW, hopefully Heap will release a CD soon). If The Deathly Hallows is a Nick Cave murder ballad, The Cursed Child is a Stephen Sondheim melancholic one: a little more sad, a little more contemplative, and far more narratively significant. The Cursed Child is the most ‘real’ of all the Potter stories, the most empathetic, the most emotional. It’s a piece about consequences and regret; one which says that (even after seven books of heroism) we don’t live in the best possible world, where heroes lose, where good people and dear friends die, and all we can do in response is cope; perhaps we can cope together. It’s a piece with the simple message that life always must go on and will go on, and what makes life going on worthwhile is family and friends, not magic and mischief; life with some love and some contentment is as good as life can be. Saying it in such a blatant, dark way through Harry Potter has a resonance that actually can’t be understated. Saying all this through characters we love, and characters we felt we fought with, has a real pertinence, a real relatability, a real poignancy that actually can’t be understated. The final moments of this piece are, frankly, the best of the whole series. The fourth act of The Cursed Child is everything wonderful about Potter, and the final scene of The Cursed Child is everything wonderful about Potter distilled into one moment of tear-jerking plain-speaking moralistic humanity. It’s Harry as our contemporary, our friend, our equal. It’s plain. It’s honest, real, relatable. Which is weird when we’re talking about a play which ends with our time-travelling heroes shooting fire at a bird girl. It’s the perfect eighth chapter. With all the compromises and caveats this contains, all is still well.
Plus my friend said that were I blonde I’d look like Scorpius, so I’ve been walking on air since.
