Growing up, Harry Potter was probably my favourite single
thing. In hindsight maybe my following of it – the books, the films, those ITV
specials they did with each release – never quite reached the fanatical levels I
became familiar with in my mid-teens in relation to bands I liked, for example,
but I certainly knew my Cleansweeps from my Nimbuses, my Hippogriffs from my Grindylows.
I read and reread the series countless times. I watched the films enough times
to be able to speak along with every line, hence severely irritating anyone who
dared sit through one of them with me. Evidently not happy with simply enjoying the films, for some reason I also found myself meticulously scrutinising errors
and inconsistencies in the total twenty hour runtime.
It’s perhaps the last of these pastimes that had led me to be already in a
mentality to be critical of any new Potter material.
The announcement of The Curse Child, an extension of the ‘Nineteen Years Later’
last chapter of Deathly Hallows in play form, came into being way back in 2013,
and if I recall correctly I was very excited by this prospect; a new Harry
Potter story! More wizarding adventures! As time went on however, my excitement
turned into vague indifference, and turned further into just forgetting that it even was happening. This was to such an extent that I wasn’t actually aware of its
release.
I returned home from a weekend away to find that my mum had bought me a copy,
and so read it, and did so with enthusiasm; like I said, Harry Potter did
define my childhood more than anything else.
Now let’s get down to it, and by ‘it’ I mean all of my issues that arise from
my aforementioned meticulous scrutinisation. An immediate problem I had was
that with each page you are painfully reminded that Harry actually named his
son ‘Albus Severus’, a title both audibly-unpleasing and attached with
momentous and explicit connotations ie. Dumbledore and Snape. The script goes
on to at times present Harry as a bad father, but I think this was already
evident in such an act.
You may argue that this is not the fault of the script itself and I’ve had nine
years to get used to the name, to which I would argue not even ninety years
would be enough for me to do so.
However, by far the biggest annoyance for me, the biggest issue and unfortunately also the
biggest cornerstone of the plot is - spoiler alert - the excessive use of time
travel. This is where it gets complicated because by its very nature time
travel is complicated, and even more so if it has been poorly written. The time
travel in The Cursed Child works in an entirely different way to how it did
back in the day in Prisoner of Azkaban. In the latter, Harry and Hermione used
a Time Turner to ensure that events that took place in their version of the
past did in fact take place – they were ensuring the outcome they knew and the
outcome they needed. In The Cursed Child, Albus and Scorpio use one to change
history. They create an alternative future, they meddle with what was and what
had to be. Also, they do not go back just three hours at the touch of a triple
spin of the Turner – they go back decades. They are then able to go back in
time again and do a different action to counter-act their previous interference
and suddenly their original experience of the present-day would restore itself,
exactly how it was. But it doesn’t work like this. An alternative past has
still been created, meaning the resulting ripples created when trying to
reverse this, although smaller than those created in their original venture back in
time, would create a completely different future when left to expand, spread
and weave over the course of some twenty-odd years. Still with me?
Upon reading The Curse Child I was reminded vividly of the heart-warming
Richard Curtis rom-com About Time. This is a film I went into with average
expectations – a good cast and a quirky storyline but a genre that tends to
make me yawn – and came out pleasantly surprised. I even considered buying the
DVD when I saw that it was being sold as part of a bundle
with Love Actually for just £2.99 in HMV once. However, it hit me, quite suddenly, about
two weeks later how its plot did not make sense at all, thanks to (you guessed
it) its illogical incorporation of time travel. About Time too consists of characters
who are able to travel back in time and then return to their present-day forms,
memories of their time travelling exploits intact, having changed the course of
history in some way. When travelling back, say, ten years, a character will
actually enter the body of their ten-years-younger self, wherever they were and
whatever they were doing at that very moment. Cursed Child scores some points
on this front in that it doesn’t echo this, instead creating the existence of
two forms of one person simultaneously in the chosen moment of the past.
In this way, at least, it recalls the version found in Prisoner of Azkaban.
However, in Rowling’s third instalment of the series characters who have
purposely hopped into the past do not simply hop back again, instead living out
however many hours they have travelled back in real time. In The Cursed Child, they
do hop back into the present-day, finding themselves at the exact moment they left, yet in an
alternate present-day wherein they are able to see before their very eyes the changes their meddling with the past has created.
Better metaphysical minds than I will tell you whether this is, in fact, paradoxical
but my cynical, over-thinking mind would confidently suggest that it is.
But let’s just put aside all the timey stuff for a moment. There are aspects of
this tale that just do not seem authentic to the original series. A good
example of this is the use of sociolect like ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’; back in
Hermione’s Hogwarts days she was certainly the biggest ‘nerd’ going and yet the
books still found ways of depicting this without the use of Americanisms that
you will very much struggle to hear British teenagers actually utter nowadays.
Whilst there are plot holes in the whole time aspect, there are also, well,
plot fails. Harry Potter has always been a very dark, frightening fable, but
the use of death in The Cursed Child seems less to make a point about loss, to
create a hard-hitting reflection of our own world or to further the plot, but
used more as an actual plot device in itself. It becomes the case, and becomes
apparent to primary characters as they learn the consequences of their reckless
actions, that certain people must die in order to prevent a far worse outcome. Although utilitarian
approaches are understandable, when forced into a rushed and fun-for-all-the-family stage play, such an approach creates a dismissiveness of those who were forced to fall.
Perhaps I’m being a little harsh on The Cursed Child. I mean, new material of
undisputedly the most popular children’s series ever from its original creator
is surely something that should be appreciated, even lapped up, whatever form
it takes. I even must admit that it was, generally, an enjoyable read (if, of
course, you manage to shove the nagging fact that it is inherently flawed to
the back of your mind).
If I were to see this objectively, I understand how it would make a good stage
play – action-packed, attempts at humour in the dialogue, thrilling plot-advancing
events happening in uber-quick succession, plus the magic of witchcraft and the
characters the audience have grown up following thrown in – but these are only
things you can truly appreciate if you are willing to accept and embrace a
complete spanner thrown in the works of the original story. The original story,
found in Rowling’s infamous, record-breaking novels and subsequently recreated
to reasonably praise-worthy degree in the movies, has been loved, treasured and
amplified throughout the world and has already bookmarked its place in literary
history. Fans past and present are now torn with the excruciating decision of
whether to take this new tale as cannon and whether to consider it with the forefront
of the legendary original series.
