Harry Potter And The Cursed Child is turning ten at the Palace Theatre, and the numbers behind that decade are the sort most producers only dream about. Since premiering in the West End in 2016, the two part play has been seen by more than 2.5 million people across a combined 1,762 performances, and it has put 276 cast members through Hogwarts along the way, 45 of them making their professional stage debuts on that stage. Somewhere out there is a generation of actors whose first ever professional bow came with a wand in hand.
For anyone who has managed to avoid it for a decade, the Jack Thorne play picks up 19 years after The Deathly Hallows and hands the story to Harry’s son Albus Severus, who arrives at Hogwarts expecting Gryffindor and gets sorted into Slytherin instead, which is a properly cruel inheritance to carry when your father is the most famous wizard alive. That father and son knot is the reason the thing works on stage, the spectacle gets the headlines, the illusions are still genuinely baffling ten years on, but the play underneath is about living up to a name.
Thorne is calling the milestone “a collective effort”, and he is proud of something specific: for plenty of the audience, this show was their first ever visit to a theatre. Director John Tiffany paid his own tribute to the artists on stage and behind the scenes who have carried the story through every performance in London and around the world.
The trophy shelf makes the case on its own. A record breaking nine Laurence Olivier Awards, still the most ever given to a play, six Tony Awards, and a haul of around 60 major honours worldwide. Ten years in, the boy wizard is not giving up his West End home to anyone.