My Unhinged Review of The Cursed Child

The visual effects are outstanding: all manner of trap doors, invisible wires, misdirection, and what seemed to be genuine magic. E.g. you “see” characters disappear through a telephone booth into The Ministry of Magic. Three at a time. You see transfiguration via polyjuice potion. You see dementors flying all over the gaff and taking b-lines at the audience in a scene that would make the most robust of five year olds cry, and give teenagers nightmares.

Despite the characters being kind of 1D, I was satisfied with the performances. Of particular note were the Timothee Chalamet lookalike who played Albus, Malfoy (Draco), and this random Irish student who had roughly 4 lines and is subject to a throw-away Avada Kedavra in Act IV.

Harry was largely irritating (true to form therefore good acting therefore bravo), as was Ginny (another bravo is due here for the same reason). Now we’re getting more into character-type comments rather than acting. Ron provided mostly slapstick comedy that I can’t imagine anyone with a fully-formed, healthy prefrontal cortex enjoying. Someone behind me howled at even the sight of Ron W. appearing on stage which I found irritating, amusing, and kind of sweet in equal measure.

Malfoy (Scorpius) was entertaining and camp and the actor had skinny legs, which I noticed during Play II and couldn’t get out of my head. Someone pointed out, during the gap between Play I and Play II, the “correct” pronunciation of Voldemort (not pronouncing the t) being used and so this is another thing I couldn’t stop noticing and being faintly irritated by throughout Play II. Especially as in this post-Voldemort world the whole he-who-shall-not-be-named thing which everyone — except for Harry, who used to drop the V word (with the t) every other day to much social controversy — used to abide by religiously doesn’t exist, so the big man gets name-dropped a lot.

There’s also this emo-type woman who BIG SPOILERS turns out to be Voldemort’s daughter. One perverse aspect of emo woman (I think her name is Esmerelda or something? I looked it up, it’s Delphi) is that there seems to be some type of romantic connection gradually forming between her and Albus throughout Act I/II even though Albus is max 15 and she is like min 30??? And this age gap isn’t really alluded to or questioned. I mean I guess it kind of makes sense because she, it turns out, is evil, and being a nonce is an evil thing to do. If that was the intention it seemed to be an out-of-place dark theme for this otherwise light-hearted play. I got the impression that it wasn’t (the intention). For some reason it was portrayed as this innocent little trick, which was slightly bizarre and made me feel uncomfortable.

Most of the characters get introduced and developed in the first 30 mins of Play I in a speed-run of Albus’s first 3 years at Hogwarts. Someone’s Mum to the right of us had to leave at the intermission because she was getting a headache as a result of this speed run. The scenes changed so quickly that I myself started to feel a little sick. Did no-one point this out? Maybe it was just unique to my (excellent, cheers) seats/view/perspective in the theatre.

Some of you may find yourselves confused by my references to Play I vs. Play II. Explanation: the writers decided there was just too much magical content to cram into 2–3 hours, so instead of subjecting people to 5–6 hours of continuous magical mystery, they decided to split The Cursed Child into two plays. Most people see both plays on the same day, with a 2.5 hour gap in between. Which is a format I liked, as I definitely would have forgotten all types of important details if there was any extended gap between the viewing of Play I and Play II. And it’s not like Play I ends in some type of crescendo, it just sort of stops. TACTICAL SIDENOTE: eat something during the gap, don’t just go to the pub (oops).

At the end of Play I we find ourselves in an alternative timeline in which Voldemort (I’m pronouncing that with the t, fuck it) essentially won and there is this Voldemort Day at Hogwarts and Dumbridge is still Headmistress. I would have liked to have spent more time in this timeline.

What do you mean “this timeline”? Oh, yeah: the whole crux is that Albus Potter randomly hears Diggory’s Dad complaining to Harry about his dead son (at this point 20 years ago), to which Harry responds sequentially with 1) it wasn’t my fault, mate, wrong-time wrong-place, sucks to suck, etc. 2) what the fuck do you want me to do about it now 3) even if I could do something, I’m very important and I can’t be bothered. Which Diggory’s dad sort of grumblingly acknowledges and accepts. But then Albus, who hears this conversation, suddenly cares immensely for some reason that I couldn’t work out. And then they (Albus X Scorpius) use a super-powered time turner (see The Prisoner of Azkaban Act III) to repeatedly go back in time, and use brute-force search to change things until Diggory survives. That’s how we end up with Voldemort day.

Let’s be very clear: this makes close to 0 sense. Why the fuck would Albus care about some random dead body from 20 years ago? You also get the logical problems of time travel, which I am too lazy to enumerate and explain here.

Couldn’t they have come up with something believable? My theory is that this plot was a result of top-down direction that looked something like this:

Include lots of references and characters and anything from the original series to give people reference points and nostalgic pleasure → use time travel to include these events → invent a reason for someone to go back in time → Albus goes back in time to save Diggory

But hey rather than this convolution, why not just go ahead and not rely on material from the previous series…? I know, I know — it’s tried-and-tested with an established audience that will enjoy it. And I did! But I would have liked to have an entirely new story with mostly new characters.

The new aspects of The Cursed Child were the most engaging parts! The bond between father and son, the difficulty of having a famous parent, inter-sibling rivalry, etc. All cool, new, interesting themes.