Precipice-1

After the epic high of the War of the Wizards when the final “Expelliarmus” was irretrievably cast by the Elder Wand, it was as though Harry Potter – and, by extension, his magical creator Jo Rowling – were poised on a precipice. It was widely held that any movement from there would be disastrous. An inch here or a millimetre there, and the perfection that had been carefully built up over thousands of pages and seven memorable instalments, crafted to the sort of climax that comes but rarely in literary history, would be shattered forever.

Many fans (including several intellectual Potterheads in my MA class) reckoned that even the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was an unfortunate thing, a flapping tail dragged in the sand: too bourgeoisie, too unnecessary, too final. They disregarded it – one junior, Swati M might have sealed the pages off from her copy altogether – and succeeded in putting Harry P and JKR back on the precipice, frozen in that glorious zenith.

What happened next

Rowling herself eventually broke free from the grave burden that descends on the artist who has unwittingly achieved supra-phenomenal success relatively young by moving on and writing about other things – Muggles mostly. After the intense public scrutiny that was the lot of her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy (2012), she invented an alter ego, Robert Galbraith, to allow the first book of her new contemporary mystery series, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) to stand on its own feet. (It got good reviews and, like most debut books that get good reviews, independently sold somewhere between 500 and 1500 copies before the author’s identity was disclosed on social media and sales increased 4000 times.)

Nearly a decade after Deathly Hallows, and 19 years after the Great War, we finally get to see Harry Potter unfrozen from the precipice, and in action again. The credit must go to the two prodigious dramaturges, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne, who convinced JK Rowling to entrust a short story she’d written to the stage, and who have collaborated with her on the script.

But of course it is a conflicted feeling for you.

You are as protective of the Harry Potter universe as of you are of your own offspring; and just as you are constantly terrified that that they will turn out unlike your expectations (well, duh, of course they will), you handle Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with kid gloves in the beginning. You are most fearful of what it will do to you that you cannot, of course, go back in time and undo.

Do not fear. Like the unexpected joys and strange twists to planning that is the truth of parenthood, this bound "rehearsal edition script", too, will leave you full, nostalgic and somewhat maudlin. (It is also suitably expensive to reinforce the fact. The Indian edition is priced at Rs 899.)

Cursed child – but which one?

My choice of parenting metaphors, and the hint of time travel, are deliberate, of course. The book, in a unique celebration of its own terrible burden, accepts as its central theme the ultimate conflicted state where the greatest celebrity (make that the greatest celebrity wizard) is the same as anyone else when it comes to the eternal trap: parenting. Indeed, the play makes parenting its grand narrative – as Harry struggles to connect with his troubled middle child Albus Severus (perhaps the pressure of the name itself is part of the problem), and through that relationship, there is a re-opening of Harry’s own fraught bonds, not just with his own parents, but with two complicated father-figures he never fully forgave: Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.

After the high heroism of their teens, Harry, Ron and Hermione have retreated happily into themselves, treading familiar patterns. At 40, Harry is a high-level highly overworked ministry official, the Head of Magical Law Enforcement, married to sports editor, Ginny, while his "boss", Hermione, is the Minister for Magic, and suitably bossy. Ron Weasley, the original joker of the pack, runs a joke shop now, focuses on the children (Rose Granger-Weasley is exactly like a mini Hermione), and occasionally gets drunk at the Leaky Cauldron with old chum Neville Longbottom.

Could they have led other lives?

The play explores just this, employing a unique narrative device.

Precipice-2

The next generation – Harry and Ginny’s three and Ron and Hermione’s two – are away at Hogwarts, which is now headed by Professor McGonagall. Harry’s scar has been benign for 22 years. Then, uh oh. Rumours begin to surface in the top echelons of the Ministry, to match the geographical movements of former allies of Lord Voldermort – the giants, the trolls, and the werewolves – and most hush-hush of all is the seed of a doubt that somebody (fan fiction writers, mayhap?) has sown somewhere: perhaps Lord Voldemort left a biological heir after all.

Albus Potter, meanwhile, is most unlike his celebrity father. Sorted into Slytherin House, terrible at Quidditch and studies, and practically estranged from his siblings and cousins, all of whom are predictably and competitively Gryffindor, he finds Hogwarts tolerable only because of his best friend, Scorpius Malfoy, son of his parents’ former arch-nemesis, Draco.

In a great rewriting of the stereotypes that have dogged Slytherin House and the Malfoy clan all these years, Scorpius Malfoy is charming, kind, loyal and geeky – and the unfortunate victim of a vicious rumour. As the two 14-year-olds embark upon an adventure, ostensibly to right parental wrongs of the distant past, they are joined by an older witch, a certain Delphi Diggory, who is as much of an outsider as them, and remarkably sexy to boot. In the course of these adventures, almost everything that Dumbledore’s Army had fought for is brought to the brink of disaster and the world as they know it is, yes, you’ve guessed it, shimmering at the edge of a precipice.

To give away anything more will be plain churlish. . Just think of it as Inception for drama, set in Potterverse.

Darkness

Instead, I want to highlight something else. Anyone who has obsessively read the Harry Potter books again and again, poring over them in loving detail as the years have come and gone, to cheer up or find comfort, to lose oneself or hunt out a stray aphorism, has always been amazed at the vast silences that nestle between the splendid and extremely organic narrative arcs of each book. There are heady worlds of secrets that threaten to suck one in.

Fan fiction has analysed these silences and darknesses, these secrets, for a long time, as obsessively as it has focussed on alternate pairings in parallel worlds. The playscript offers a hat tip to both these facts, as it were. It also pays its respects, in its own peculiar karmic fashion, to specific themes that belong chiefly in three of the seven books: the Prisoner of Azkaban (time turning), the Goblet of Fire (the Tri-Wizard tournament, and the dark turn it took at the end) and the Deathly Hallows (Godric’s Hollow).

HERMIONE
Harry, I get it. Paperwork's boring...
HARRY
Not for you.
HERMIONE
I'm busy enough with my own. These are people and beasts that fought alongside Voldemort in the great wizarding ward. These are allies of darkness...But if the Head of Magical Law Enforcement isn't reading his files –
HARRY
But I don't need to read it – I'm out there, hearing about it. Theodore Nott – it was me who heard the rumours about the Time Turner and me who acted upon it. You really don't need to tell me off.
HERMIONE looks at HARRY – this is tricky.
HERMIONE
Do you fancy a toffee? Don’t tell Ron.
HARRY
You’re changing the subject.
HERMIONE
I truly am. Toffee?
HARRY
Can’t. We’re off sugar at the moment.
Beat.
You know, you can get addicted to that stuff?
HERMIONE
What can I say? My parents were dentists, I was bound to rebel at some point. Forty is leaving it too late, but…you’ve just done a brilliant thing. You’re certainly not being told off – I just need you to look at your paperwork every now and again, that’s all. Consider this a gentle – nudge – from the Minister for Magic.
HARRY hears the implication in her emphasis; he nods.

Karma

The past, especially one as troubled as Harry Potter’s, invariably casts long shadows. There is the more obvious guilt of associates lost, and a deeper, sort of unnameable sorrow at the death of innocence. But burying it all with hectic activity might not be the ideal solution, after all.

Thus, there is, through the next generation, an attempt at probing other possibilities – could things indeed be very different if the timing of this or that changed? This is an interesting experiment in examining these deep questions that belong, really, in the realm of metaphysics; and yet, the play is full of such delightful twists and turns that you don’t even realise the (bitter) life lessons you ingested in the interim.

Part One ends with a mother-of-all cliff-hangers, and you are reminded of the novels that used to suck up at least one whole day and night, and then some. You wonder if JKR’s ever going to write one of those again.

Palace theatre

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened on July 30 to packed houses at London’s Palace Theatre. The tantalising stage directions suggest that it is a treat, what with all the magic and the mayhem. Perhaps this is a superb idea to bring theatre smackbang in the middle of popular entertainment discussions again, and get people to read more plays.

The familiarity in the banter between Harry, Hermione, Ron and Ginny make it endearing rather than annoying. (The only person who put me off was Panju. Who’s Panju? Go read the book!)

While fans might find Harry Potter’s descent into bourgeois life rather disappointing, the realistic streak will probably ring a bell with anyone who has been, or has to raise, a difficult 14-year-old. This book is not for children, not really.

The darkness is now more complicated than ever before. Instead, it is really for the generation – ours – who read and loved Harry Potter as adults, and are now looking to it for some magic to transform the mundanities of their – our – own lives. While a nice seven-hundred page novel would have addressed the hunger better, perhaps a bound rehearsal edition script allows our twitter-exhausted brains to function better.

A winner, in spite of excessive sentimentality towards the end.

Devapriya Roy is the author of The Vague Woman’s Handbook, The Weight Loss Club, a PhD dissertation, and The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat, along with husband Saurav Jha. She may or may not be a witch. But she definitely owns a cape, a broom, and other relevant gear.