:::: One Part FANDOM RETROSPECTIVE, One Part ANALYSIS ::::
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play that premiered in London, 2016. It was met with praise by theatergoers and disdain, even hatred, by those who read the script. Today, there is a...
The following is an abridged version of the interview, with selections that apply to our discussion. Reading the full interview would have taken something like an hour, and no one has time for that. The Interviewer is Mark Phillips, who first profiled author J.K. Rowling in 1999 before she truly hit it big.
PHILLIPS: What did theatre hold for you as a prospect?
ROWLING: If I'm honest, it was the prospect of working with these guys. Because Sonia and Colin, our producers, were offering me the chance to work with two people that I thought were extraordinary. And I felt confident from our first meeting that we could make something really special happen. Now, I could have been wrong. We still have had a huge amount of fun doing it, because we ended up very good friends, and that's an incredible thing to take two very good friends for, out of a creative process like this. But it so happens that three of us worked very, very well together, and I think we produced something we're all very proud of.
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TIFFANY: We're now talking about bringing it to Broadway, which we're so excited about, aren't we?
ROWLING: We really are.
TIFFANY: As we progressed with the ideas for the story, and the three of us kind of met and started talking about, you know, what story "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" was going to tell, it became clear to me that we were gonna be doing something quite unique, in that we were taking a group of characters that an audience had seen through seven books and eight films, and we were going to tell a new story featuring those characters. And so it's been such an honor, hasn't it, sitting in the audience from the very, very first performances, seeing the people come in, knowing these characters and yet not knowing what was going to happen to them. And the gasps! It's exactly why I went into theatre and became a theatre director -- you want people to gasp and coo and be unified as an audience together watching the story. And that's been a joy.
ROWLING: No, it's amazing.
PHILLIPS: Did you actually have a fear, though, that they might not like it?
ROWLING: Of course. Good lord. Of course. I don't think any sort of creative person alive would not understand how we all felt going into that first preview. I think we three, do you agree? We felt we'd made it as good as we could make it. We were proud of it. We thought we'd done a good job. But, you know, that's three of us.
PHILLIPS: But the weight of expectation, I would have thought--
ROWLING: Yeah, exactly. It's the weight of expectation. You know that people are coming in with a huge number of preconceived ideas. You know that candidly, some people are taking the view, "Maybe they've just dialed this in. Maybe they're just trying to get a little extra out the franchise." And we knew it was something very new and different. But the proof is when the audience sees it.
