Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Script Review
The following is my Goodreads review, where I gave Harry Potter and the Cursed Child 2 stars.
This honestly gets a 2 1/2. I love Harry Potter and my heart somehow doesn't allow it to give it 2, but it most definitely does not deserve 3 stars. This review will be full of SPOILERS, so beware - you have been warned. It is almost unnecessary to point out that I am, as are millions of other readers around the world, a massive Harry Potter fan, who grew up with the books and read them countless times. I also thoroughly enjoyed J.K. Rowling's first adult novel The Casual Vacancy and have continued to support her in her post-Potter writing career and am thrilled about the Fantastic Beasts film(s). But after having read the Cursed Child, I fear she has started to lose her mojo... if she even really developed the story. I somehow decided to believe she didn't to preserve my favourable opinion of her and that this is all Jack Thorne's hodgepodge. Even this, however, is hard to believe since Thorne is supposed to be an esteemed playwright. Perhaps he is, but not for this literary universe. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child feels and reads as fanfiction written by a 12-year old after s/he watched all the eight films (not read the books) and scrolled through a couple of HP fanpages. I find the utter lack of understanding the characters or even how the world works unfathomable. I realise this is a play and not a novel (and it shows, as I will discuss later in the review), but this should not be an excuse for a poorly-written, horribly-characterised mess. As a production this surely works better with undoubtedly great performances by world-class actors and what I imagine must be a breathtaking scenography, probably so flashy in fact that it has blinded critics and theatregoers to such an extent that they are giving it praise after praise. But since I am reviewing the script book and not the play, where all the visuals are supposed to be painted inside one's head and not served on a silver platter, I can tell you that the Cursed Child falls flat with a splat of a stale pudding. I'll start with the positives since the paragraph will be much shorter. I generally enjoyed Albus Severus Potter. He is by far the most developed character (as he should be, since he is the titular character) and his troubled relationship with Harry was by a mile the most interesting part of the story. It is easy to see how being the child of the famous Boy Who Lived would be a terrible burden, especially if you do not live up to the expectations. The script cleverly opens and closes with an intimate Harry-Albus relationship and this is probably the only arc that is somehow opened and closed in a satisfying way. Is this the plot of the Cursed Child, you ask? Oh, no, no, no. Why would you make an interesting troubled relationship of a boy with a first, middle and last name weighing him down and his saviour-of-humanity father the main and only focus? In fact, why would you even set the story 19 years later if you don't have anything interesting to say about that period, really? No, we need to fill the script with deus ex machina after deus ex machina, generic characters and time travel. Yes, you read that right. Time travel. When I first heard that the play will be about Harry's son and will take place after the epilogue from Deathly Hallows, I was sceptical. I always felt that there wasn't much story to be told and if JKR were ever to write another HP book, a much better idea would be to set it during the First Wizarding War or even sooner, exploring the details from the early lives of Dumbledore, Voldemort, the Marauders or literally any other character with an interesting backstory. It's not that the sequel starring Harry's children would have nothing to say, I just didn't imagine there was enough to merit a novel. I guess I was right. The Cursed Child either doesn't want to or doesn't produce enough material to explore issues that may arise in the time years after the defeat of Voldemort, so it resorts to the cheapest way imaginable to produce some excitement - time travel. That's no big deal, you might say, do they travel back an hour or so? You would be wrong. The time travel takes our characters back into the time of the original Harry Potter series, revisiting (albeit with alterations) many of the original characters, places, and events. This, as you can imagine, can go two ways: either it is a positive little nudge to the beloved original series, or it starts to unnecessarily meddle with what is a perfectly ok original story. You can guess which one it is. The Cursed Child (henceforth CC, because I can't even bring myself to spell out the entire title) for me fails in several different ways, which are most easily enumerated using good old points: 1) It is too 'all over the place' for a play: if you've read any plays, you will know that most feature a relatively small number of characters and take place in one or a handful of locations. This makes sense, since plays rely heavily on the dialogue and the characters and less so on the movement through space and time. Most of the best plays require nothing more than an empty nondescript room and well-developed characters. It is of course naive to expect the CC to be such a play and I did not expect that when I delved into it. However, the very short acts that constantly shift settings and skip 'irrelevant' events bothered me. One second Albus and Scorpius jump off the Hogwarts Express, in 2 pages they are visiting Amos Diggory in a nursing home and 3 pages later they are already at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, where Harry (because dreams, I guess?) suddenly knows where to look for them. To me this is lazy writing and feels like reading the very concise version of sparknotes and not a complete story. Characters just seem to know where to go or what to do off-page (or off-stage) just so the very bare skeleton of the story can progress. And attributing this to the medium of a play is no excuse - if this is the case, then the writers are unaware of how plays are supposed to be structured to work on a page or even on stage. If you cannot properly tell a story with so many settings, then downsize it. 2) Awful characterisation: let's address the elephant in the room and get it out - we are somehow to believe that before the Battle of Hogwarts, Voldemort and Bellatrix conceived a daughter, Delphi, who is posing as Amos Diggory's niece. Although I do not personally approve of this plot point, failing to see how Voldemort would have a relationship/daughter in the first place let alone when he was completely obsessed with the quest to procure the Elder Wand and destroy his foe, this is not even close to what my problem with Delphi is. She is a non-character. She keeps appearing and disappearing seemingly at random throughout the play, yet apart from the description of her hair, there's nothing to her. Towards the end her already non-existent personality is reduced by another lazy trope - a prophecy. If the Harry/Voldemort prophecy from the original series was at least well-explained and logically inserted into the story for a greater purpose, the one in the CC comes out of thin air to clumsily explain the villain's motivation and the entire convoluted Cedric plot. It is sad how the writers could not come up with a new original antagonist, perhaps an underground network of (ex) Death Eaters if nothing else, but instead opted for what is essentially an attempt to reincarnate Voldemort using an empty shell we are to believe is his daughter. Delphi, just as she randomly appears in the CC, is gone at the end, apparently transported to Azkaban to stare at a wall or something. Now, let's talk about the second butchered character - Ronald Weasley. "You know what we need?" probably said one of the writers, whoever it was, "we need humour. Comic relief. Stupid one-liners. People love those." And so Cursed Ginger Ron was born, a character so empty, he feels like a bland impersonator of PC Jimmy Carr. That's all I have to say. Other characters are not much better and most serve little purpose but to be there because they are beloved or notorious characters from the HP universe (such as Snape, Umbridge, and Dumbledore, or rather his portrait). None extend beyond one dimension or act according to their personality from the original novels. Any other new characters, most notably a random Hogwarts student named Craig Bowker Jr. whose sole purpose is to be killed off by Delphi so the killing curse can be put into the play, but not to be used on a character that actually matters, are equally bland. 3) The generic, derivative plot full of conveniences: the original Harry Potter series have their fair share of deus ex machinas, for sure. However, the ones used in the CC are something else entirely. Not only, as I already mentioned, do the jumps in setting from act to act conveniently sweep under the rug important backstory and much-needed scenes that would bind the tale together, but also abruptly disturb the pacing to such an extent that at multiple times I had to turn back a few pages because I was sure I skipped an act or two (btw, I didn't). Deus ex machinas, the most notorious one surely Draco's pretty gold time-turner he just happened to have for decades, are forced and poorly explained. The same goes for the 'rules' regarding time travel, (bad) fanfiction-like alternate timelines, disregarding certain rules of the HP universe (underage Albus and Scorpius perform magic outside Hogwarts like it's a walk in the park), and oh right, the lady who sells sweets on the Hogwarts Express is apparently over 200 years old, her pasties can be used as hand grenades, she walks on top of the train and develops spikes on her hands if anyone tries to leave the train. So there's that. There is so much more to say about this disgrace that is the Cursed Child, but perhaps the most appropriate summary is found in the book itself, when one of the stage directions reads: "Ginny is not sure what she's supposed to be." Indeed, this story doesn't know what it is supposed to or what it wants to be. It feels as if a hired writer composed it after having skimmed through a few fanfiction stories convinced s/he now knows what the fans want. But Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will never be (despite it being marketed as such) the eight Harry Potter story, it does not even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the original series. I still cling to the hope that JKR did not produce this, but of she did and this is indeed the last Harry Potter story we will ever get, then it is sad to see the series (if I may borrow T. S. Eliot's words) end not with a bang but with a whimper.
