Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

I did it! I got a copy of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by being patient and waiting until it was my turn to borrow it from Toronto Public Library. More amazingly, I avoided all but the slightest spoilers in the months between the premiere of the play and the arrival of the book on the holds shelf.

You can avoid them, too. Just don’t scroll down.

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So, you may ask, since I know it’s the foremost question on your minds, now that we’re free to discuss spoilers, what did you think?

The short answer is, I liked it. It eased most of the places that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows rubbed raw for me. And that, I think, is a problem for many.

See, what I didn’t like about Deathly Hallows — and, to be fair, the whole HP series — are the places where its creator’s worldview chafes against mine. J. K. Rowling and I agree on lots of big things: it’s good to be kind to other people, everyone should be equal, bigotry is wrong. But we often disagree on what those things look like in practice.

(I’ve gone on about it at length, so I won’t expand here, but just in case, here’s an example. J. K. Rowling and I agree about gender equality. It’s great that Hermione is a positive female character — but what about the general dearth of women in the Potterverse? Why does Hermione do everything, especially the female-coded tasks (schedule-managing, underwear-washing) for the boys? Why do all the “good” female characters have to be “good” wives and mothers while being a “bad” mother is a sufficient to make a character bad?)

Cursed Child does not speak in Rowling’s voice. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, that’s cool.

But the good news is, if you are also interested in how other people imagine the world of Harry Potter — if you are willing to engage with this as theatre, a collaboration that can be fluid and change meaning depending on who gets to tell the story this production, rather than as literature, which we conventionally see as the product of a single artistic creator — this play is great fun.

It has action, drama, snappy dialogue, spectacle, interesting character interaction, and humour.

It is also sometimes draggy, on-the-nose, and still socially problematic despite some major shifts in tone.

Here are a few main points that explain why I think so.

– Race and gender. This is still a play about straight, white men/boys. In the Potterverse, you are allowed to be a girl if you are the only one in the group of heroes and/or always relegated to supporting a man. You are allowed to be a dead woman who inspires living men to do good things. You are allowed to be gay if you never mention it directly or have a romance identified as such.

Equally problematic, Cursed Child continues the Potterverse’s troubling tokenization and mischaracterization of race. If, like me, you’re white, please listen to what writers of colour have to say in articles like these. It’s 2016. Accidental or not, racism is not cool.

Because this is a play, not a movie and not a book, there is hope on these fronts. The casting of Black actresses as Hermione and Rose is a great step forward. The awesome thing about theatre is that all it takes is a different casting, and suddenly anyone of any gender, ability, race, ethnicity, sexuality etc. can be the hero. However, this doesn’t solve the problem that these characters are written from a privileged perspective to resonate with privileged audiences.

To put it another way: it’s fantastic that J. K. Rowling is 100% behind the idea of Hermione being a woman of colour. However, fellow white people, it’s disingenuous of us to praise Black Hermione and not keep in mind that these characters are written as “white default.” White audiences and artists, we need to actively confront and dismantle the ubiquitous convention that when a character’s race isn’t described, they are white. For the same reason that being “colourblind” isn’t good enough, we need more characters of colour who aren’t possibilities (“Hermione could be Black because her race is never explicitly identified”) but certainties.

+ Slytherin. Part of what made me uneasy reading the Harry Potter series is the idea that being good is entirely about who are with little or no suggestion that your environment affects what choices you’re allowed to make. Slytherin house, it seemed to me, was the epitome of this philosophy: put a bunch of kids in Evil House, treat them like they’re evil already, and is it really their innate evilness when, after seven years of this, they go over to the side of evil?

But happily (for me), the play does a one-eighty. There are ordinary Slytherins — dorky nerds like Scorpius Malfoy (more on him later) and cynical rebels like Albus Severus (a Potter? In Slytherin? OMG! cry all the Hogwarts students and alumni who have apparently never visited fanfiction.net). More importantly, the play’s alternate universes let us see, people who might choose good under the right circumstances can also make the wrong choices if the world around them is different.

Hermione has it in her to be cruel to students like Snape was if, like him, she nursed a broken heart. Draco can be both loving, supportive father and authoritarian tyrant. Scorpius contains universes: his intelligence and empathy can take him bookish or jockish, sweet or arrogant.

– … but also, *sigh*, Slytherin. However, this comes at the expense of showing us exactly what it means to be put in Slytherin House. Yes, the play breaks away from the idea that the Sorting Hat is an accurate assessment of your innate personal characteristics, but there are also clearly real differences between the houses (Albus is unhappy as an alternate-universe Gryffindor) that the play never really settles on.

Do students shape the four Houses based on what they think their designation tells them about themselves? Does the Hat Sort by characteristics after all, only everyone is wrong about what those characteristics mean and the potential of students who possess them?

These would both be interesting takes, but the themes of play never really coalesce into a clear picture of why the naive idea of Sorting is wrong or mistaken or misperceived, which undermines the theme.

+ Scorpius Malfoy. Scorpius is the best and most distinct new character. He is the fanon Slytherin we’ve always wanted and up until now have found only in fic: sassy but sweet, realist, dorky. The nice theatre nerd who is always cast as Horatio and never Hamlet. Millennial. He is the only person in the entire Wizarding World who speaks like he would not find Buzzfeed mystifying.

– Odd thematic mixed messages. This is a play about parents and children, usually fathers and sons. However, sometimes it’s a play about how parents and children don’t always understand each other but can still find ways to love and support and value each other, no matter how different they are.

And sometime’s it’s a play about how evil is totally hereditary, because, as you may know from reading WTF??? articles and memes, an important plot point hinges on whether Voldemort had a child and who that child might be.

And it turns out in the end that such a child does exist and is exactly like Voldemort despite, for obvious reasons, never having met him. Like… half the play is about the pressures of living up to your famous dad when you’re not much like him, and the other half is about Voldemort’s kid trying to live up to the father who was EXACTLY the same in personality? Or maybe we’re supposed to see You-Know-Who Jr. as a foil to Albus who failed by subsuming self to be just like Dad instead of acknowledging parental differences?

In any case, a character who believes they’re Voldemort’s child seems to me to be a lot more interesting (and plausible) than a character who actually is. The lengths to which the story goes to cement a biological parentage suggests that even the good guys of the Wizarding World are way more biased about bloodline than is comfortable, and, worse, that they’re right about that?

+ Snape. Obviously, you have to have the dramatic moment where Snape or portrait!Snape learns that Harry named a kid after him. Cursed Child doesn’t disappoint.

– A bunch of other characters. Lupin? Sirius? Tonks? Teddy Lupin? Bueller?

+ Great character opportunities. Let me end with this one. Although many beloved characters are missing from this play despite opportunities (logistically, anyway) to include them, there are a lot of fan-service scenes that let characters confront each other the way we always wanted; let adult characters speak about the depths of their childhood selves; let characters display the emotions that were only hinted at from Harry’s perspective; and let characters show us the ways they’ve matured since we last met.

Sometimes, this means oblique critique of the original stories. Harry and Dumbledore’s portrait have a conversation that subverts some of the Christian imagery of Deathly Hallows. The man Draco’s become helps us see that some of what Harry perceived as malice was frustration and unhappiness. From Albus Severus’s point of view, we see how Harry’s much-praised courage is also his arrogance, depending on how it affects you, and as wonderful as selfless love is, it can be selfish if you ignore that other people don’t always want what you think they should.