Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the award-winning play and final instalment of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, is coming to Australia.
The play will be staged exclusively at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre in early 2019, with details of ticket sales and performance dates yet to be released.
Set 19 years after the last Harry Potter book, 2007’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the script adaption of the Cursed Child smashed sales records after its release in 2016.
The script, written by Jack Thorne and based on a story by Rowling, Thorne and John Tiffany, sold more than 680,000 print copies in the UK in three days and 2m copies in two days in the US.
In Australia, it became the fastest selling book of 2016, shifting 170,000 copies in three days.
We are thrilled to announce that #CursedChild will be coming to Melbourne, Australia in 2019. Follow @HPPlayAUS. https://t.co/T2doPgBkD0 pic.twitter.com/cQJgbjbdff
— Cursed Child Play (@HPPlayLDN) October 23, 2017
The show’s London run sparked a similar frenzy, selling a record-breaking 175,000 tickets in 24 hours, on its way to becoming the most decorated play in the history of the British Olivier awards.
Tickets, especially to the show’s eight-week preview period, were sold out and hotly contested. Third-party resale sites offered seats for as much as £2,950 within hours of a general release.
The two-part play, which will premiere in the US in April, runs for five hours and follows an adult Harry Potter and his wife, Ginny Weasley, as their youngest son, Albus Severus, begins at Hogwarts.
In Australia the Michael Cassel-produced play will be directed by the original West End director, John Tiffany, with music by Imogen Heap and Australian casting by Melbourne Theatre Company’s serendipitously named casting director, Janine Snape.
In an announcement video, Tiffany said he would arrive in Australia in early 2018 to start the audition process.
Series creator JK Rowling added that she was “very excited about coming to Australia with Cursed Child”.
“I’ve never been to Australia in my life,” she said. “Maybe at last I’ll get there down under.”
Reviews for the play have been generally positive, with the Guardian’s Michael Billington awarding it four stars.
