Picking up where book 7 ends, the main cast drop their kids off for Hogwarts and Albus, the son of Harry and Ginny, and Scorpius (not even kidding), the son of Malfoy and someone random I never heard of, strike up an unlikely friendship. They both suck at school and are pretty endearing but are also friendless and pale in the limelight of their fathers. Especially Albus, who feels a let down from the moment he’s sorted into Slytherin. The two concoct a plan to get ahold of a time turner to change history, and things go wrong.

I had pre ordered this back when and never gotten to it. I listened to the people who said it was really bad, and they were right, unfortunately. While some allowances need to be made for the conversion from fiction to drama, it was still massively contrived even within the parameters it sets up and within the HP universe. A particularly huge contrivance. The characters also felt very smoother over in the conversion. Basically an em dash for any pause. Weird context is labelled within scenes, like the boys’ heads being “in hell”. Obviously, they wanted to make it family friendly and easy to for children to understand, but even then the diction is really swingy and doesn’t accomplish that goal. There’s a weird love potion joke thing Ron does, giving one to a kid, which just feels kinda gross and not thought out, especially after the info we have now, about Voldemort being conceived via one. And then that turns into an even further contrivance. But how Ron himself turned out is as little convincing as the other adults.

Really, all it has going for it is a semi zany fun plot and some cute lines between the children. Otherwise it’s contrived and solipsistic and has wildly terrible dialogue, which is a large issue for a play to have. It’s only heavily, heavily didactic, which is not my jam.