_Harry Potter and the Cursed Child_ Review

Finished reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child this evening. It was a big letdown for me. I wished that the publisher had given me the definitive, director's script with photographs of the production instead. Drama does not become literature until it has undergone its definitive production. What is a rehearsal script, after all, but an unpolished version with superfluous scenes that the authors will insist on retaining? In this case it is a rehash of characters, plots, and subplots from the previous seven novels with too much magic that functions as deus ex machina. One can only imagine that the final production played like a long episode from Masters of Illusion, with a montage of numbers just as short and just as sketchy. There is a difference between complex and convoluted, and this play certainly isn't the former. It is at best a test script or an audition script. At worst, it reads like a story originally conceived as a novel with the hidden agenda of being shot as a movie, and then mentally translated to the stage in an endeavor to make a difference.

The play has a premise, specifically about fatherhood and childhood, but only well into Part Two does one accept that something dramatic is really at stake, and the authors had to murder someone in order to establish that. In all the early scenes everything is just about a shared identity crisis on everyone's part, and as early as page 42 I realized that the play might not really have a focus at all. The dialogue is peppered with weak banter meant to titillate the audience, and none of the roles are acting roles. If this is drama, it is certainly drama without economy, and is merely a young-adult melodrama. Moreover, the blueprint of the production seems to rely on visual spectacle rather than on character, which is a no-no onstage. I was looking for depth in character that the novels do not provide. Indeed, the most insubstantial and unlikable character is, surprisingly, Harry Potter himself, and on top of that he is just as one-dimensional as everyone else.

Many of the scenes, especially those in the beginning, are nothing more than tedious exposition. They take us backward rather than forward (despite the Time Turner motif). The REAL play begins in Act 2, Scene 16, and I wonder if the director ever considered cutting out everything before that. A director, after all, is always a legitimate co-author of a play. It might even have done the work a lot of good had it been handed to the likes of Webber and Rice or Stephen Sondheim. The world would then be already singing Harry Potter songs with wonderful lyrics.

Finally I am surprised that, after 19 years, the work does not manifest the maturity I would have thought it to have. The readers of the series, after all, have already grown up--as have the performers of the movie versions.

Many readers I know did not like this book but could not exactly pinpoint why and decided, instead, that it was because this read like "a play". A real play, on paper, reads like sheet music and is hard to understand unless one can "sight-read". Hence, perhaps, the superfluous exposition scenes that over-explain.  My personal analysis is that this play is about the author's fear that her magic may be no more. It is a manifestation of her subconscious desire to turn back time and go back to when she first received international acclaim. In attempting to do so, she goes back to Square One, like a poet constantly rewriting his favorite poem after every publication, insisting that it is not yet finished. Ironically, the author was at her true peak at a time in her life when she was on the edge of poverty. Now that she has "food on the table", the elves have abandoned her to assist other, needier, persons, and so the magic may have gone. I believe that when an author's status in life has changed, he/she should not venture into previous subject matter. There is only one British author who successfully exploited her subject matter in many volumes, and that is Agatha Christie, yet she was, of course, writing mostly about adults--and she hardly changed her status drastically.

I have all eight Harry Potter books now, and I must say that this one is really corny. It is clear from the last three scenes that the authors do not quite know--or are unwilling--to end the story of Harry Potter. They are elegies a la Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman. There are hints that the story could go on and on for many more generations to come, and I wish that that wouldn't happen. All such attempts, like this one, would merely un-closure everything that had already been given closure. I don't want to sit back and watch the series deteriorate any more. I don't want to keep buying books and rewrite the stories in my mind along with the author's tortured cogitations. Harry Potter has served his author well. It is probably time to put him to rest, and leave everything else that happens to the readers' imagination. Otherwise the boy himself would truly be a cursed child.