Keeping secrets, breaking spells: A fan's experience watching 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child'

I often refer to June 25, 2016, as the best day of my life. It was an eventful day in London – the day of the annual Pride parade, the day after the results of a rather unfortunate referendum had been declared – in all an interesting time to be in the city. But for me, it was the day I watched Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts I and II in all their brilliance.

Being a Harry Potter fan in India is difficult, to say the least. I’ve never experienced the heady rush of going to a midnight screening of the latest Potter film, or camped out in anticipation of the release of the next book. In fact, my most exciting Harry Potter experience was being taken to Midlands, Aurobindo Place (Delhi), by my parents at 7 am to pick up a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 

That was when I was 10. Nine years later, I have a Harry Potter experience that is difficult to match. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play based on a story by J.K. Rowling, officially opens on July 30 and the script book, which releases the next day, becomes the official eighth instalment of the series. It picks up where the final book left off, 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts and as Harry’s son, Albus Severus, leaves for his first year at Hogwarts.

We waited in line for three hours outside the Palace Theatre for returned tickets, desperately hoping that somehow, somewhere there were two people daft enough to give up their seats to a show that is sold out until April 2017. 

When the man from inside the box office emerged, and told us we could have excellent stall tickets for 100 pounds, we agreed in a heartbeat.  My mind was doing cartwheels, a feat that my body unfortunately cannot match. 

The seven hours I devoted to this play (each part is two and a half hours long, with a two hour break in between) were genuinely some of my happiest. 

The feeling of being inside a theatre with 1,500 other people who love the story of The Boy Who Lived as much as you do is something that can never be recreated. You marvel at the exquisite staging, the synchronised gasps and the collective sighs elicited by the magic of the play and the memory of the books – it is a sense of community like no other and the atmosphere is electric.

It makes you laugh uncontrollably, but there are also moments where you cry watching the characters you have come to know and love. I was scared, I was angry, I was ecstatic, and I would not have had it any other way.

Despite Rowling asking everybody to #KeepTheSecrets, the plot has leaked online and most fans are not just disappointed, but also appalled. And while I do admit that the storyline probably seems ridiculous on paper, it works wonderfully on stage. The stellar cast makes the old characters feel like extensions of the ones we left behind, and the new ones are as magnificent as you would expect. The sets, the lights, and the music in particular, come together beautifully to create a - excuse the hyperbole - spellbinding production.

I am left with many questions, generally about time, space, and math. I am also not sure how the script book will work, but as a play it is a worthy sequel. It is a remedy for the nostalgia I have felt for Harry Potter – it fulfills the yearning for that former time and place where the wizarding world was still uncharted and exciting.

Most characters, as well as the interplay between them, felt like they had waltzed out of the books and onto the stage before me. The dynamic between Harry and Draco is everything I could have ever imagined and more. Scorpius Malfoy is absolutely the most glorious aspect of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – but I will say no more. 

Besides, narrating the plot to anybody without all that the stage provides would be tedious; essentially akin to retelling the most bizarre dream, or some of the trashiest fan fiction. But in a way, that’s why it works – everything that we have been imagining and reimagining is there – Albus is sorted into Slytherin, there is a masterful Polyjuice potion scene, there are strained parent-child relationships and, most crucially, universal truths and hilarious, heartwarming moments.

I am going to #KeepTheSecrets, because every Harry Potter fan deserves the feeling of being enchanted all over again by the universe that has given so much to us.