At 356 pages, it is a considerably faster read than many of the later Potter tomes. The familiar pace of the seven Potter novels - each of which took place over the course of a single school year - is gone, replaced with a narrative that spans years and then lingers on a few days. Without actors behind them, unestablished characters feel flat and underdeveloped. The stage directions, though cheeky and fun at points, are vague, leaving much to be desired in descriptions of setting and action scenes. What kind of expectations did Harry saddle poor Albus Severus Potter with by giving him those three names?Īs a script only, it takes a little too long for Cursed Child to draw the reader in. It examines the bond of father and son, and what makes that bond more than perfunctory. Established relationships are tested.īut Cursed Child is less about actually rewriting the past and more about how that past affects the future. Dead characters return, if only temporarily. A new villain, the resurrection of the time-turner device and several poor choices take the boys back to Harry’s past, allowing Rowling to rewrite her own stories, which she has seemed so keen to do since the seventh book, Deathly Hallows, was published in 2007. The script follows Albus Severus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy, two young wizards trying to find their place in Hogwarts and the world the way their fathers, Harry and Draco, did before them. In critiquing and potentially changing Harry’s past, the play justifies its own portrayal of his future.Īnd while reading the script (three out of four stars) is an incomplete experience - noticeably lacking the richness that acting and staging would add to a realized production and the familiar Rowling prose a novel would have contained - it may capture just enough of the old Potter magic to please even the most skepticalfans. The author has encountered her fair share of criticism for being stuck in the past, constantly tweaking and expanding the Potter universe she created, to the point where some fans and critics would simply like Rowling to move on.Ĭursed Child is, in many ways, a direct response to that criticism, taking readers back to the great moments of the series while also spinning the Potterverse forward. Rowling, who crafted the Cursed Child story with writer Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany. It’s a line Harry might have been saying to his creator, J.K. “We've been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we've blighted their present," a 40 year-old Harry Potter says gravely. There’s a moment in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - the new play resurrecting Harry and friends onstage in London, and published as a script-book - when Harry and his old rival Draco Malfoy are discussing their relationships with their respective sons.
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