Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Part One and Two
Playscript
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two may not be performed in whole or in part and no use may be made of it whatsoever except under express licence from the rights holders of the work, J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter Theatrical Productions Limited.
J. K. ROWLINGTo Jack Thorne who entered my world and did beautiful things there. JOHN TIFFANYFor Joe, Louis, Max, Sonny and Merle… wizards all… JACK THORNETo Elliott Thorne, born 7 April 2016. As we rehearsed, he gurgled. A CONVERSATION ABOUT READING SCRIPTS
between director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne JACK
The first play I ever read was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I was at primary school and very excited. I can’t remember clearly, but think I mainly went through it looking for my lines. Yes, I was an obnoxious little brat and yes, I was going to play Joseph. The next play I read was The Silver Sword, a theatre adaptation of the Ian Serraillier classic. I wasn’t going to play the lead in that – I think I played ‘third boy’ or something. I wanted to play Edek Balicki. I would have given anything to play Edek, but sadly my acting career was in terminal decline by then. I was nine years old.
JOHN
The first script I ever read was Oliver! aged nine (even at that young age I was vaguely aware that the exclamation mark meant it was a musical – it’s Oliver.
with songs!). I had been cast as the eponymous orphan in the Huddersfield Amateur Operatic Society’s 1981 production. I have no memory of attempting to change my accent, so our production must have been a strange reimagining of Dickens’s original in which Oliver’s mother finds her way to a workhouse in West Yorkshire to give birth. Like you, I read through the script looking for my lines. I remember making a special trip to buy a fluorescent yellow pen so I could highlight Oliver’s lines in my script, just like I’d noticed my fellow cast members do. Obviously, I thought, this was what marked you out as a seasoned performer. It was only later that the Artful Dodger pointed out that I not only had to highlight my lines, but also commit them to memory. And so began my lessons in reading plays.
JACK
I wish I’d seen your Oliver. And your highlighted script. I always admired your pristine brown directing notebooks. My scripts are – and always have been – dog-eared, covered in indecipherable notes and smeared with baby puke (okay, the puke is a relatively new addition).
So how do you think scripts should be read? How can they be read? When I was trying to write the stage directions for publication – in those final few weeks of scramble before we opened – I got really worried about all this. I remember in rehearsals we’d delete chunks of the script because the actors were communicating something effortlessly with a look so they didn’t need the lines I’d written. This script was created for a particular group of actors, but others need to inhabit the roles too. The reader needs to visualise the characters, as does the director.
