I'm too old to associate the Harry Potter books with my childhood, and I always find it faintly bemusing when anyone I think of as 'my age' (a bracketI'm too old to associate the Harry Potter books with my childhood, and I always find it faintly bemusing when anyone I think of as 'my age' (a bracket that includes people from their mid-twenties to mid-thirties) does so. I didn't read the first Potter until after I'd seen the first film, when I was at university, but nevertheless I've come to associate both the books and the films with comfort. Along with certain cosy mystery series – Marple, Rosemary & Thyme, Death in Paradise – and kids' TV shows from my student years, I've often watched and/or read them when I was ill or depressed (or both), and they have stronger-than-usual connotations of a particular form of escapism: escape to the enclosed and 'safe' feelings typically associated with childhood, without recourse to things from my actual childhood, which might provoke more specific and complicated memories.
I think all of this helped Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to work better for me than it might for a true Potter devotee. I enjoyed – more than I expected – being back in this world; it's familiar and comfortable, even with the 'nineteen years later' angle, and that's what I wanted from it. The Albus/Scorpius dynamic is perfect (a big thumbs up for Slytherin heroes, too) and it's exciting and fun. And yes, it is a script and not a book, and it suffers for that, but I actually think the dialogue does a pretty good job of replicating Rowling's typical style. It has its much-discussed problems, notably that Harry's other two kids might as well not exist, and more problematically that the time travel stuff throws a lot of things from the previous books into question; these would undoubtedly be less noticeable in a stage or film version, where you'd be caught up in the visual magic of it all. (It's difficult to imagine how some of the effects described in the stage directions would actually be achieved in a theatre, and that can be quite distracting when you're reading it.)
If you ignore the offputting title, this is really interesting on the oddness of the 'it reads like fanfiction' critique so often levelled at the play/script/book....more
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