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Jamie Parker, played Harry Potter
My first answer when I was asked if I was interested in the role was confusion – I felt a little long in the tooth playing a teenager. I read it for the first time Harry Potter book and watch a few movies, but he was just past the right age when it all started. I didn’t know that there was a coda in the last book that shows the events 19 years later, and that’s where the drama begins.
I’m happy to admit now that I thought this show was a bad idea. But many successful shows and negative thoughts on paper. And I’m used to eating my words – that started when I saw the team involved – producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, and many other producers I’d take a blind contract to work with, at least. Jack Thorne. I thought, if this is as close as I get to being in This Is England, I’ll do it.
Yes, as soon as I took the part, I had Stephen Fry’s book reading on loop. By the time it came to rehearsal, a year in London, and then a year in New York when it went to Broadway, I had listened to the entire series seven times and was a Potterhead.
The two parts of the play are about the next generation coming up, and the chickens coming home to roost, but they weren’t about one-man shows and the same pressure. Everything you do ends up being an outlet for your neuroses that you burn off and put into some kind of grit that you use as a piece of theater. Like Harry, I was not yet 12 years old when I took the train back to boarding school in Scotland. I even had round glasses!
I was always looking for things that challenged me, and I had never done anything like this before with all the magic. I thought, I hope I can learn how to do it… I don’t know, but let’s find out! Playing different musical instruments helped – there is a song that is created according to the illusion of illusion. But, as anyone in my life can tell you, I can’t walk through a door without hitting the back of my hand on the latch – my spatial awareness is terrible. The fact that I made it through the tight entrance and exit, circling all the ropes of the heavy machinery at speed, in the dark, without harming myself or anyone else is a miracle.
There were times when things didn’t go as planned. One night in a duel scene with Alex Price (Draco), I gesticulated and my wand caught part of my clothes. It slipped out of my hands, and it went into the helicopter down to the right. Without thinking, I stopped myself and reached into the darkness with half of my body from the stage in the hall. Somehow I caught it. Alex said, “Yes!” – if they watch cricket!
At the first show, the energy and anticipation that went through the theater was almost palpable. It was said to us that this was like opening a new Star Wars movie but in one cinema around the world – we had audiences from Australia to the Philippines to Canada. But, outside of the main commercial opening, there was a real sense of the place being precious, even if I could say, a sacred place. The audience was in their seats 10 minutes before the start and I didn’t hear the phone stop once. I have never known to pay attention to people like them.
Jamie Harrison, fraud the creator
I started doing magic when I was a child and for a long time I was making money, but later when I was studying acting at drama school, some teachers told me that I was a vaudevillian and that I should hide it on my CV. I set up my own theater company, Vox Motus, and started introducing tricks into our games without really knowing what I was doing, but it was a safe place for me to explore new things.
When I started writing, I didn’t sleep for three nights thinking, “What have I done? This is so full. There is so much magic!”
There were times when Jack wrote in the script – “and they disappear” or “magic happens here” – and it was up to me to decide what to do. Then there were other facts that we knew for sure that had to be the Patronus charm, or the Polyjuice potion that transforms one person into another.
People often think that magic and trickery are on the shelf. They say, “Who made that?” But I’ve always tried to take the works of the geniuses of the past, and rework them to bring something new to the audience.
Audiences love the phone box and enter the Ministry of Magic by calling “MAGIC”. It almost never happened. John (Tiffany, the director) was trying to make the show different from the movies. He said, “I don’t want to put a big red phone box on stage…can we think of another way to do it?” Christine Jones, the designer, and I were looking at old photos of King’s Cross and saw an emergency phone on the wall in one of the cottages.
I made it out of cardboard and pieces and pieces in fabric, and we started to recreate the famous mascot moth trick that a magician called David Devant did 120 years ago – a person comes on stage with big moth wings, folds them around and disappears. It was bad to begin with but we developed it and brought in brilliant designers to create different iterations. We worked on it and it looked great – I was very proud. Then we did the first screening in front of a test audience of Harry Potter superfans. And one of the slogans was: “You can’t do a Magic Service without a phone box!” Sonia and John said: “We know we said we didn’t want a phone box, but by next week we need a phone!”
I will not reveal any of our secrets. Of course not! I can say that people often think that there are trapdoors that are used in sequence when there are none. This show uses shadows and light in clever and incredibly precise ways. It may look natural and handmade, but there is a lot of technical skill involved and a great team. There are many computers – it looks like a ship.
The Expelliarmus spell (where the wand jumps from one person’s hand to another’s) is an advanced skill that the cast must begin practicing on day one – there is a real skill involved. Now there are probably hundreds of actors who have worked hard and are realizing how magical life can be. That was the first thing I had to show JK Rowling. He was really interested to see it with Time Turner when he came to one of the first interviews. We set up a show, but none of the actors were confident enough to do it yet. So John said, “You should do it.” I was more nervous than the actors! I showed it and he said, “Oh! Do it again!” You know you have someone when they ask to see you again. I was very happy. I wanted to say no, a magician doesn’t repeat his magic, but it was JK Rowling, so, yes, we did it again.
The original two-part production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child celebrates 10 years on 30 July and is at the Palace theatre, London until 20 September; and Production of one part opens on 9 October.
