Hi, hello, I'm a full-blown maniac, and I haven't let a piece of Harry Potter escape my attention in over a decade. So when the first photos from the upcoming stage productions were released, I found myself asking — what will Albus Potter's cousins be doing in The Cursed Child ? Continuing the leap into the future originated with the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we know that Harry and Ginny's middle child Albus Severus will be the main focus of the storyline, with his older brother James Sirius and his younger sister Lily Luna also featuring heavily. And, because of Albus' age, we also have a little glimpse of who else will be in his Hogwarts class; namely, Scorpius Malfoy and Rose Granger-Weasley.
Rose Granger-Weasley is of course the daughter of Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, which makes her Albus' cousin. So since she has such a close family connection the main characters of Cursed Child, should we be expecting to see a lot of little Rosie? And maybe even her brother Hugo? And what about Lily Potter and James Potter, who don't appear with Albus, Harry, and Ginny in the initial portrait? Will we be seeing them? Short answer: yes and no. (Sorry, I never said it would be straight-forward.) Obviously, I haven't gotten a look at a script or anything, but all signs point to a pretty tight focus on our main three, here — Albus primarily, and then James and Lily.
That actually turns out to be a good thing. As with all J.K. Rowling creations, this world is fleshed out beyond our wildest dreams, so it would be both insane and distracting to try to pack in a storyline for every student we've heard offhand mentioned up until now. This is an entirely new generation. Yes, we're familiar with the Wizarding World itself, but every student there probably has a family connection that we'd be interested in hearing about and following. We'd all like to see which former Hogwarts students ended up together, and whose kids are dating whose kids, and I'm getting off-track just imagining all this stuff going down. So think of how it would play out onstage, chasing down all those various storylines.
The movies never dumped a whole bunch of new characters on us at once if they could avoid it, always spacing them out so we didn't get overwhelmed, so it's a relief that the show seems to be doing the same thing so as not to take away from Albus' story. Which is a very real concern, because guys, seriously? Look at this cast.
Wowzers, right? That's 42 people, y'all. It's easy to forget that we're not working with an eight-book series, with plenty of time to throw in details and build a world and get to know every character; we have just the length of a play. (Or, well, two plays, since the piece will be split into two parts, intended to be seen in sequence.) So, even though I'd be as delighted as the rest of us to get to know the precocious wonder that is the entire clan of children that the Potter-Weasley-Granger clan has produced since the end of the series, I'm glad that we'll be keeping our main focus on Albus Severus. Just like his father Harry before him, we have Albus' entire life and personality to catch up on in the space of two performances. Any details that we get about his fellow classmates after that point are just icing on the cake.
Image: Courtesy of Charlie Gray (2)
