Harry Potter, now 37 years old and perpetually stressed out, stands with his wife, the former Ginny Weasley, at Platform Nine at King’s Cross station. His kids are going off to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The cheery Granger-Weasley clan is there too. But Harry stares witheringly at Albus, his younger son who seems strangely reluctant to cross over to Platform 93/4, which is the only way anyone can get to Hogwarts. Unless you’re sitting in the Palace Theatre in London for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the stunning, six-hour, two-part, densely plotted, maniacally detailed, utterly J.K. Rowling-esque, thrillingly and theatrically wrought sequel to the “Harry Potter” series that has the global Potter universe curious, consumed and terrified of disappointment.
Harry is surely disappointed with his son, who was named in memory of Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape, two former Hogwarts headmasters of great import to his dad-seeking dad. Albus is desperately trying to live down all the pressures of a celebrity father. In a few minutes, the cute bespectacled kid who charmed the children and parents of the 1990s, and who now is played by the fine actor Jamie Parker, who looks like a menacing Stephen Colbert, will commit the ultimate mistake for a father.
He’ll tell Albus that he wishes he were not his son.
He will not find it easy to take that back. Albus will not find it easy to come back.
Time turns — many times in these dramatic hours — but never changes the truth that teens are difficult. So are dads, especially those reliving their childhood traumas and darkening as they age, especially a dad whose scar is beginning to hurt again, portending no good.
The play is penned by Jack Thorne, although based on a story collectively forged by Thorne, Rowling and the show’s emotionally intuitive director, John Tiffany, working with his frequent collaborator Steven Hoggett, an artist whose signature movement work at the intersection of human propulsion and overt dance is proved here to be thoroughly Rowling-esque. For Hoggett’s work features people propelled through time and space as if wrenched by their hearts.
Tell that to Harry. In that crucial first moment of perhaps the best piece of populist theater I’ve ever seen, Harry Potter jollies — or should that be bullies? — his son to run with confidence past the platform Muggles and through to the other side.
Albus isn’t convinced. He well knows that his dad met all his famous best friends on the train on his way to school that first day. What if he meets no one? What if he cannot do any better than Scorpius Malfoy, son of Draco, who could be the son of Lord Voldemort? What if he turns out to be the loser Potter? The screw-up Potter? The dispensable Potter. The spare. The disappointment.
What if the sorting hat puts him not in his dad’s beloved Gryffindor but in Slytherin? For the sorting hat can take the measure of a boy, maybe better than can his father. What if he hates Hogwarts, his dad’s nirvana? What if?
Wait.
I picked up a free button — or a badge, as the English call it — from an usher, sometime around 10:30 p.m. Saturday night after saying farewell to my chatty seatmates, most of whom looked like they’d been through the emotional ringer, along with Sam Clemmett’s honestly expressed Albus, in London’s West End. The button read #keepthesecrets.
Given all the hype surrounding this show, with a ticket demand at least the equal of “Hamilton,” the admonishment has been remarkably effective to date, a few churlish websites excepted. That’s partly because Potter people are loyal to one of the great serialized narratives of the modern age. But it’s mostly because nobody — well nobody whose name is not Lord Voldemort — could possibly sit in a theater like this for hours and hear the communal gasps emitted by the majority, yes the majority, of the audience whenever something in the new story unlocks, or subverts, some narrative assumption imprinted on those who read all seven of the books, and then want to spoil those moments for those who’ve had to wait for months, and empty their post-Brexit savings accounts, to get anywhere near a ticket.
The fear in Potterville was needless. Heretical as this may sound, I walked out of the theater quietly lamenting that the Potter movies ever were made. Tiffany, Hoggett and, not least, the set designer Christine Jones and magic persons Jeremy Chernick and Jamie Harrison collectively make the case that it is the theater that more naturally expresses the Rowling gestalt beyond the page. And although there is resonant music from Imogen Heap, thank God they did not make this a musical.
Although with the cliches of musicals, the language of the movies is avoided like Hollywood were full of death eaters, which is not entirely untrue. One spectacular manifestation of this determination comes when Albus and Draco (yes, him, quietly played by Alex Price), stand outside Hogwarts, awed by the view. They speak of its beauty and we see it with them, even though the lighting designer, Neil Austin, is just lighting the interior of the Palace Theatre. In that same vein, the Hogwarts Express is just a collection of suitcases. Quidditch remains in the mind’s eye. That fools you for when the Dementors take over the theater as they surely do, just as they can take over your spirit.
For all that determined avoidance of digital stimulation, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” still is spectacular. Characters constantly disappear inside magic cloaks, the scenery shakes as if one of Harry’s many unpleasant dreams, fire and brimstone arrives when needed. It is an enveloping design, but the vocabulary remains wholly theatrical. And that puts the demands on the imagination that the Potter people in their costumes (I mean in the audience, not onstage) all so badly want.
None of that would matter a jot without the human scenes between characters who seem so consistent with their antecedents, despite their age. You can see the young Hermione in all that the unrelenting Noma Dumezweni does, even though the actress, superficially at least, is totally different from Emma Watson. Paul Thornley is exactly as you’d expect Ron to be, grown up but hardly. No wonder the stressed Hermione married him; he was her savior, you come to see. She and Harry would have been disastrous together.
Are there any flaws in the piece? Well, I suppose I should note that this show is a lot, if you don’t care for wizardry, although it moves like the Quidditch World Cup. If you turned nary a page of the Scholastic blockbusters, you might struggle, although you just as easily might not.
And it’s true that while Rowling set up Harry and Ginny with three kids, this show is really interested is only one; J.K. Rowling did not get to be J.K. Rowling by using multiple protagonists. The other two (apparently uncomplicated) Potter kids are conveniently absent whenever anybody is busy traveling through time. Not that I am saying anyone travels though time (and not that I am mentioning any of the surprise characters who should not be mentioned), although an additional opportunity to do so does show suddenly and conveniently at one point. But events sure play out in ways mysterious and mystical. At a certain point, you come to see the audience feels so secure in the authenticity of their experience, they’ll go anywhere and believe most anything.
In short, this is an extraordinary dense narrative — so much so, in fact, that it reminds you of just how much story can be contained in a drama, and just how little story some young writers attempt. But that’s not what lives with me as I write. Here is why it’s so extraordinary.
“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” works because it centers on, and feels so utterly consistent with, the two central themes of the Potter books.
One is that every child deserves a loving family. Denied such, children will search for them for a lifetime. And the search will go on once the child has a child of his own. Often to the detriment of that child.
Pain, Rowling always has written, is central to the human experience. Its arrival is inevitable. And thus parents cannot protect their children from agony, they only can prepare them.
Most especially, they can teach them to be open with those they love about what they feel, throughout their lives. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a remarkable achievement from a woman with exquisite taste in collaborators and who seems to rarely put so much as a foot, or a Tweet, wrong, makes clear that if Rowling had her way, no child would be cursed at all. Even one with most of the most famous mothers in the world.
“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” plays at the Palace Theatre in London’s West End. The show is currently sold out through May 17. A new block of tickets will be released shortly, the producers say. The script will be published Sunday. Visit www.harrypottertheplay.com. Chris Jones is a Chicago Tribune critic.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib
RELATED STORIES:
What’s the next ‘Hamilton’? Could it be Harry Potter?
Magic returns: Bookstores celebrating ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ with release parties
‘Potted Potter’ at Broadway Playhouse: When Harry met silly
.galleries:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
background-color: #144A7C;
margin: 16px auto 0;
height: 5px;
width: 100px;
}
.galleries:before {
content: “Entertainment Photos and Video”;
display: block;
font: 700 20px Georgia,serif;
text-align: center;
color: #1e1e1e;
var playlist = ‘chi_ent_movie_trailers’,
layout = ‘autoblurb’,
iu = ‘%2F4011%2Ftrb.chicagotribune%2Fent’;
Watch the latest movie trailers.
