This is the script for the play put on by the Palace Theater. It picks up where the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hollows left off, with Harry, Ron, and Hermione adults and Albus Potter heading off to Hogwarts. Albus has a lot of trouble fitting in and his only friend is huge nerd, Scorpius Malfoy. When the Ministry of Magic finds a time turner, Cedric Diggory's father shows up at Harry's house to demand they use it to prevent his son from dying. Harry turns him down, not wanting to mess with time travel, but Albus, who overhears the conversation and is having serious issues with his dad, decides to take matters into his own hands, sending him and Scorpius on an adventure to his dad's past and a series of darker and darker timelines.
While I did like Scorpius and Albus--their friendship, their snark, and their nerdiness--the returning characters felt off. It makes since because they've aged twenty years since we last saw them, and we wouldn't expect someone in their forties to act the same way they did when they were teenagers. But it feels like they've moved on without us and we don't know them anymore. We followed these characters through so much, that it seems unfair for them to mellow out without us. At one point Ron Weasley says he should do the thing because he's "the most chilled out of all of us."
...Excuse me? Since when is Ron Weasley the most level headed person in a room? The Ron Weasley I know holds grudges and complains and turns bright red all the time because he's so angry. This must surely be the darkest timeline.
The story had a similar feel to the novels. There were shenanigans and magical goofiness and friendships and drama. There were red hearings and a fake ending and an unexpected bad guy (who for the first time in a Harry Potter book, I called on first meeting them). You can hear Rowling's voice in the stage direction.
"And there is a great woosh of light. A smash of noise.And time stops. And then it turns over, thinks a bit, and begins spooling backwards, slow at first...And then it speeds up."But let's talk about that stage direction. Stage direction is supposed to describe the scenery and tell the actors what to do and when to enter and exit and sit down at a table. Not how they feel. It's not supposed to provide backstory.
"There's real emotion in this room." So stop phoning it in, guys.
"And this scene is all about magic." As opposed to the rest of the play.
"This is St. Oswald's Home for Old Witches and Wizards and it is as wonderful as you might hope...These are people relieved of the burden of having to do magic for a reason--instead these witches and wizards do magic for fun. And what fun they have." The scene that follows is less than a page. I have no idea how they convey this backstory.One of the challenges to reading a script is that not only do you need to visualize the scene as you would if you were reading a novel, but there's an added layer where you have to imagine how it would work onstage. I can imagine an invisibility cloak, but imagining how an actor would put on a cloak and vanish pushes at my suspension of disbelief. there are dozens of scenes in each act, some only a few pages long, necessitating what I imagine to be massive scene changes.
I also imagine that the stage manager and art director read this and went, "Well...Crap...At least we have a huge budget to make this happen!"
Such imaginings pull me out of the story. And that's the problem here: reading the script is not a great way to experience the story. I wish I could see the finished stage performance (which I have no way of doing), or that this was a novel instead.
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Next Week: The Dark Days Club, demons in period costume by Alison Goodman.
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