![]() ![]() I’m sitting next to one of the youngest people I can see – Maddie, 16, who tells me things like: “Did you know there are 142 staircases in Hogwarts?” – and I am filled with a profound sense of pride in the kids these books produced. At the performance I attend, the audience is mainly twentysomethings taking selfies two guys behind me discuss the representational politics of Dumbledore’s homosexuality. When The Cursed Child box office opened, 175,000 tickets sold out in 24 hours – more than half of them to under-35s. But then what of The Iliad or Beowulf, composed for recitation but plonked on the page for posterity – would we not consider those literature? Many actors argue that Shakespeare’s plays shouldn’t be studied in schools, as he is only truly appreciated through performance. Should plays be read? Many would say, no – plays are written to be performed. It was marketed as a benevolent gesture to those who could not see the play in London, but even as someone who queued for at least four Harry Potter books, it was hard to imagine kids lining up for screeds of stage directions. How had he gained 12 years on me? With every subsequent announcement, I got more cynical: it’s five hours long? Split in two parts? The final nail in the coffin: a midnight release for the play script in book form. By my late teens, I was such a big fan I donned a Sirius Black costume before queuing for the final instalment.īut when it was announced in 2015 that Harry would return in a new story, the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and that he’d be 37, an overworked civil servant, struggling with parenting, I was dismayed. With more than 450m books sold since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, JK Rowling’s series transformed reading into something genuinely cool during my lifetime. ![]() When the final book came out a decade ago, we were both 17. ![]()
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