Spoilers ahead!
New and official Harry Potter material has been something that just about all fans of the enormously popular series have been hoping for since the last film was released. Pottermore was a decent stop-gap, with J.K. Rowling providing vast detail about, well, everything, and the actual ability to get sorted into your Hogwarts house! (Hufflepuff, in case you were wondering.) But the announcement of the Cursed Child sent Potterheads’ excitement levels into overdrive. A play, partly written by Rowling, set in the Harry Potter universe with an accompanying book! With the rumours swirling about the possibility of a prequel or even a direct sequel, expectations were high, and they weren’t tempered once it was confirmed that the story would focus on Albus Severus Potter, previously only met in the epilogue of the final book. So does the book of Cursed Child hold its own among the massive popularity of the rest of the series?
The short answer: Eh, kinda. Reading a Harry Potter story as a script of a play is quite a novel experience, with the only official work so far being in novel or film form, but it’s not a difficult thing to get adjusted to, especially when the characters and the setting are so familiar for the most part. In fact, the characters and the setting are probably the most appealing part of the script. Despite the focus being on Albus and Draco Malfoy’s son Scorpius, there’s a lot of your old favourites popping up. Harry, Ron, and Hermione (as the badass Minister for Magic) all play significant parts along with the likes of Ginny, Draco and McGonagall (as the same person as before, but also badass). The vast majority of the book being set in Hogwarts also helps with the transition from book to script, since the reader already has a solid base with which to imagine the stage directions describing the locations. There’s even more familiarity partway through when the protagonists are transported back to the events of Goblet of Fire, the events of which end up being very important to the plot of Cursed Child, which is a nice nod back to the past. This aspect of the script (as with all Harry Potter material) is up there with the most enjoyable parts, with the scenes forming themselves beautifully in the mind.
The excellent settings definitely help to improve the script, especially as I have a couple of problems with other parts. The plot is the epitome of solid-yet-unspectacular, and it’s definitely interesting enough to keep you hooked for its entirety, even if it starts a little slowly with a lot of backstory to set up for the new characters. Once the time travel actually gets going it’s a lot more exciting, the constant changes in the universe appealing to those who like their “What if…” fanfics, and while the whole “changing something small in the past causes massive changes in the future” feels like a bit of a cliché, the ripples make sense and the escalating drama doesn’t quite get to the point where it’s silly – although it definitely touches the threshold (I’m looking at you, world in which Cedric Diggory became a Death Eater and everything is evil). Speaking of evil, the antagonist of Cursed Child is a little ropey. For a lot of the book there seems to be something really intriguing building up, the idea that Albus maybe isn’t just a Slytherin but is actually evil and would go head-to-head more directly with his father and/or his best friend (boyfriend, really, I mean did you read their dialogue jesus christ look at it it’s so obvious). But this disappears about two-thirds in, in favour of Voldemort’s daughter Delphi, who is kind of threatening until you realise the main threatening/murdering she does is of underage wizards and a very old man. The whole idea of Voldemort having a daughter is also pretty odd and isn’t really explained well enough to be properly engaging, and it feels like a cheap way to keep Voldemort as the villain.
Actually it’s a lot of the characters that drag Cursed Child down, with some odd decisions being made for characters old and new. Albus slaloms wildly between angsty-but-relatable teen to full-on arsehole which doesn’t help the reader relate to his problems. Yes, Albus, it must be difficult having your father be the most famous wizard ever but he kiiiind of went through a bunch of stuff himself as a kid so maybe lay off him a little. Scorpius manages it (sort of) and his dad was an actual Death Eater. In fact, Scorpius is a much better protagonist than Albus. He’s had a much more difficult childhood than his friend, yet he manages to throw off the stereotypes about Slytherins and is a pretty well-rounded, likeable kid throughout the script. Albus meanwhile whines his way through half the play then gets away with almost causing the apocalypse mostly by being friends with a more competent wizard. Truly he is his father’s son. And speaking of the Boy Who Lived, Harry’s general uselessness at parenting is another concern. Considering how much focus is on James and Lily throughout the whole series you’d think that Harry would be better at parenting to the child who needs it most. Albus goes through what Harry most feared when going to Hogwarts: getting put into Slytherin. The epilogue to Deathly Hallows makes it seem like Harry knows exactly what to say to his son if that does end up happening, but in Cursed Child he has absolutely no idea how to deal with this family oddity, even saying at one point that he wished Albus wasn’t his son, which is so un-Harry I don’t even know where to begin. These little character problems unfortunately combine to bring the quality of the script down a fairly significant amount.
So that’s Cursed Child. It’s not great, with a few problems in plot and more than a few in character development, but it’s certainly not awful, or even bad. There are some nice moments, especially involving Hermione and Ron, and it’s almost certainly a better experience to go and see the show itself rather than just reading the script (No, I am not lucky/patient enough to have got tickets). Overall it’s a nice little return to the universe before it returns to our screens this November with Fantastic Beasts. And as always, more official Harry Potter content is absolutely welcome.
(Cheers for the title Sean, much better than anything I came up with)
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