As the audiences at Harry Potter and the Cursed Child prove, you don’t have to know any rules to be fully engaged in the theatre, you only have to want to be there and be told a really good story in an imaginative way.
When I spoke recently to Harry Potter’s director, John Tiffany, whose production of The Glass Menagerie is at the Edinburgh international festival, he talked aboutrealising how important it was to get the Potter play right for an audience who are heavily invested in the story, but for whom theatre is not a familiar medium. It was a responsibility he took very seriously.
“I knew in my heart that this is theatre on trial, because we’ve all read the books and we’ve all seen the films and have an expectation. Sixty per cent of the audience who have booked are first-time theatregoers, so I wanted to create a love letter to theatre and say to people it’s not about comparing the stage show with the books and films, but [rather]: ‘This is what theatre can do and no other art form can.’ All we need is your imagination. So, that was the guiding principle for us – it felt very pure because of that. Like a kind of rough magic.”
Photograph by Manuel Harlan.
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