Maybe I'm late getting onto the old hype train, but yesterday evening I finally picked up Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I read it in one sitting.
And was horrified.
The truth is... The Cursed Child is, at its very source material at least, an incredibly broken piece of theatre. Because I can't just hop a plane and pop over to the West End for an evening showing (or, in this case, two), I know little about the production. Who knows: maybe the director was able to salvage something. And several critical reviews have praised actors' performances in this play.
Cursed Child doesn't feel like a piece of theatre: it feels like a piece of fanfiction. The show is not written to be executed easily by a team of theatrical collaborators. The play, parts one and two, has a staggering total of 75 scenes, many of which called for their own separate locale; for comparison, Shakespeare's Hamlet only has 20 scenes across 5 acts. Plus, its beefy runtime of 2 hours and 40 minutes (part one) and 2 hours 35 minutes (part two) will intimidate smaller theatres with brief rehearsal schedules.
Not to mention, the cast is so bloated in size that, even with several actors doubling (and occasionally tripling) in parts, the ensemble is still 35 strong. The sheer amount of scenes, characters, and locales will make it almost impossible for smaller theatres to perform once the production departs the West End and, inevitably, Broadway.
Worse than that, the stilted, exposition-heavy dialogue is difficult to read and completely misses the mark of the sharp wit and tender humanity of the novels, creating an inconsistent Harry Potter universe. Lines like "Dog diggity, Cedric Diggory--you are a doggy dynamo" and "Wow. Squeak. My geekness is a-quivering" litter the script. Perhaps the actors' performances made it work, but, like most readers in the United States, I don't have access to that right now, and am forced to judge solely on source material (and its $30 price tag). I found it incredibly difficult to reconnect with beloved childhood characters when they were so busy talking themselves through this convoluted plot.
Ah, yes... the plot. Without getting too spoiler-heavy, all I will say is that it will be difficult for younger children to understand. Rowling's series of novels were relatively simple but full of nuance and intricate foreshadowing; the play has absolutely none of that, instead rearing right for the melodramatic. Theatre is about subtlety, psychology, verisimilitude, or at least consistency within an established universe; and it feels like Cursed Child tries to hits those marks and fails in every way.
To be quite frank, I would have preferred it if Ms. Rowling had left her beautiful universe alone. Instead, we get this fanfiction.
