When does Harry Potter and the Cursed Child actually open? The first preview of this two-part show took place on Tuesday night: the second part follows on Thursday. Anxious for a scoop, the Telegraph and the Mirror have both published first-night reports with details of the show. But critics will not be invited to give their verdicts until after the official first night on 30 July. This seven-week gap, unprecedented in London though not in New York, makes nonsense of the whole notion of a “first night” and raises serious questions about the idea of “previews”.
In London, the preview practice dates back nearly 50 years. In 1968, the producer Michael Codron caused a furore by announcing that a West End double-bill of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Sean Patrick Vincent’s The Audition would have 10 “reduced-price previews” before opening to the press. The idea, imported from New York, was a response to a specific problem: the slow demise of the touring circuit which, in the past, had given creative teams the chance to iron out a show’s technical difficulties before a London opening. Codron’s innovation caused grumbles both from the Society of West End Theatre about prices and from the Critics’ Circle about abuse of standard practice. In the end, Codron won the battle and no one broke the reviewing embargo.
Personally, I’ve never been that fussed about previews: I understand the need to get shows right and welcome the idea of lower-price tickets. But a pitch of absurdity was reached last year with the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet at the Barbican. Expectation ran high but a production that wasn’t technically complicated had a full three weeks of previews. The rest is hysteria. The Times famously broke the embargo and despatched their junior theatre critic, Kate Maltby, to review the very first public performance. I attach no blame to Maltby, who had little choice but to obey her editor’s instructions and who wrote a very intelligent, if largely negative, review. But the Times’s action was not only unethical: it also provoked three weeks of media madness about a production that, when officially unveiled, turned out to be a dismal affair.
Do we have to go through all this again with Harry Potter? Will we have to suffer nearly two months of press hoopla and online opinion-mongering before the official first night? I guess we will. There is even a danger that, by the time critics get to see the show, they will be reacting as much to the media hype as to what actually happens on stage.
Since the whole preview business has got out of hand, I suggest three practical solutions. One is that, in the case of a production like Harry Potter which sparks intense curiosity, showbiz reporters should be formally invited to the first preview not to deliver a verdict but simply to describe the occasion. My second proposal is that preview prices, which have crept up in recent years, should never be more than half that of the cost of post-first-night tickets. My third idea is that no show, however complicated, should be permitted by the Society of London Theatre, as it is now called, to have more than two weeks of previews (maybe three weeks for a two-part show like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child).
I doubt anyone will listen to me. But, as operated at present, the whole preview system is outdated, absurd and works against the public interest.
