Hi, Alan and all you Harry Potter fans. I got this on Wednesday, but
had to clean it up so it could be legible. I hate emails that are
saved in HTML code!
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A Wizard Comes to the Stage: Harry Potter Magic Continues.
By SARAH LYALL; Roslyn Sulcas and Christopher D. Shea contributed
reporting.
Follow Sarah Lyall on Twitter @sarahlyall
LONDON -- When we last left Harry Potter, in the final pages of J. K.
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. 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.
Now Harry is back -- in a play, this time -- and we have to reconsider
the whole thing. All is no longer well in Potter-world. 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
Londonon Tuesday, felt like an author sending a Valentine to her
longtime fans. 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. Rowling
worked her mischief, in their old familiar ways.
For 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. 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.
Cursed Child, with a story by Ms. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack
Thorne, has been years in the making, and the subject of keen
anticipation--even though relatively few people will ever get to see
it, compared
with the many millions who have read the Harry Potter books or seen the
movies. It was odd, too, to watch the action unfold onstage. Reading
the Harry Potter books was for so long a rite of passage for so many
children (O.K., and adults), and the movies always felt like faithful
adaptations that didn't advance the plot. But this was something
completely different, this sensation of coming to the story not alone
in the corner with a book, but in a large theater in the company of
some 1,400 other people.
Who knows what adjustments the play will go through before it opens;
previews are often a time for tweaking. I began the evening slightly
worried about what Ms. Rowling could do to a narrative I had read in
its entirety years ago and, like many fans, had always associated with
a particular time in my life. But above all she is a storyteller, and
once more I could not resist the ingenuity of her plot and her joy in
her fictional world.
Here were a host of memorable characters, many of them making what
amount to quick cameo appearances, much as a star might drop into a
movie for a few minutes. Here were a second generation of new
characters, including Scorpius, the unexpectedly delightful son of the
decidedly undelightful Draco Malfoy, and of course the troubled Albus,
whose adolescent struggles to make sense of himself, his friends and
his family form the focus of the play. How exciting, when you've just
reread Deathly Hallows and been reminded of what happened, to see what
Ms. 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. She then rushes rapidly
forward a few years, and shoots off into all sorts of unexpected
directions. And then we get to learn the thing that most drives every
fan in these situations: What happens next?
(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. In any case, we will
try to keep it vague.)
Exciting 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. The tantalizing question arises of what might or might
not happen to the present if you try to tamper with the past. 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. 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. 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.
"It was even better than I thought it would be," said Iman Khabl, 23,
who had come from Edinburgh to see the play and who said she had been
thrilled to find references to sometimes abstruse details from al seven
books. "It was such a nice nudge to the fans, that they brought
everyone back, that they kept our favorite characters while bringing in
so many other things."
The play attracted the usual complement of superfans, including people
dressed in Hogwarts robes bought from the internet; people who had
flown from California the day before and were being kept awake by
little more than caffeine and hysteria; and a pair of newlyweds who
ditched their honeymoon in Iceland for the chance to see the play.
Ms. Rowling has done an excellent job of shrouding the production in
suspense, letting out the occasional detail -- Hermione is played by
Noma Dumezweni, who is black; Albus is, basically, a disaffected
youth-- when it suits her. It's hard to believe that further details
will remain secret until opening night on July 30. (The play's script,
No. 1 on the Amazon pre-order list, is to be let out into the world at
12:01 a.m. on July 31.)
But for now, even fans lucky enough to procure tickets don't know how
Cursed Child ends. The play is in two parts. Only the first half was
presented on Tuesday, and it ended on a truly shocking note of
suspense. We won't learn what happens until the first preview of the
second part, on Thursday night. One thing we still aren't sure of:
Which character is in fact the cursed child?.
PHOTOS: A young fan in line for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Fans at the Palace Theater in London on Tuesday for the first preview
of the Harry Potter play.
(PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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Bonnie L. Sherrell
Teacher at Large
"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise
cannot see all ends." LOTR
"Don't go where I can't follow."
