Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Finally Gives Up Being the Last Two-Part Play Standing

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child | Palace Theatre until 27 June 2027

For ten years, if you wanted to see the whole of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you had to do it the hard way. Two parts, two separate theatre trips, the better part of three and a half hours between them. London didn’t, until now.

From 9 October, the show that held two generations of West End audiences in its single two-part embrace for a decade now tells its whole story in one sitting, at the Palace Theatre, in two hours and fifty-five minutes. The old two-part version played its final performance on 20 September. What opened a fortnight and a half later is not an abridgement so much as a correction, bringing London into line with a version that has been running everywhere else for years.

That detail matters more than the press notes let on. Writer Jack Thorne, who scripted the play from a story he developed with J.K. Rowling and director John Tiffany, has described the show’s various condensed versions as staging posts on the way to something more accessible. What rarely gets said alongside that is how long London held out. San Francisco, Melbourne and Toronto all moved to one-part productions years ago. Tokyo followed in 2022, Hamburg in 2023. The West End was the last major production still running the two-part version, while Tokyo continues with a longer interim staging.

None of which takes anything away from what the two-part version actually achieved. I saw it twice, and it earned every minute of its runtime. The stage magic in this production is not a gimmick bolted onto a script, it is the entire reason to buy a ticket, a genuinely startling mix of Victorian-era theatrical trickery and thoroughly modern engineering, staged as well as I have seen anywhere in London. Scenes that should be impossible on a stage happen right in front of you, and the trick is that you never quite catch how.

The new cast taking over the single performance includes Ethan Rouse as Albus Potter, Zoë Rainey as Ginny Potter, Hasia Akwaboah as Rose Granger-Weasley, Adam Jackson-Smith as Draco Malfoy and Bill Stanley as Scorpius Malfoy, joined by David Ricardo-Pearce, Thomas Aldridge and Naana Agyei Ampadu continuing as Harry, Ron and Hermione from the two-part run. It is, in other words, a genuinely new company inheriting a decade-old show, not just a shortened script performed by the same faces.

The anniversary framing around this relaunch has pulled in some unrelated news. Rupert Grint is indeed about to put Ron Weasley’s robes back on, following Tom Felton’s run as an adult Draco Malfoy, but that is happening on Broadway in New York from February, not at the Palace Theatre. Neither actor has any connection to the London production currently booking, reimagined or otherwise, and nobody from the original film cast is scheduled to appear here.

What I actually want to know, and don’t yet, is whether a story built on spectacle and slow accumulation survives being told faster. The two-part version had the luxury of time, two separate evenings to let its illusions land and its emotional beats breathe. Compressing that into one sitting is either a genuine sharpening of a baggy, over-long epic, or a loss of exactly the thing that made spending an evening in Jack Thorne’s wizarding world feel like an event rather than an errand. I plan to find out, and I will report back.

Readers who saw the five-hour version should brace for something faster. EyeOnLondon will be back once John Martin has seen the one-play cut for himself.

For more London arts and culture, visit EyeOnLondon at eye-on-london.com.

[Image Credits | Matt Crockett]

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