We have had a splendid day, despite our unanimous agreement that today’s theatre trip, being Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, was utter rubbish.
We did not even manage to work out which child had been cursed.
If you get the chance to go and see it, don’t bother.
It is a massively long play, being in two parts. You have got to go and see them both in the same day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, so it is a huge event, but alas, it was twaddle.
There were some splendidly exciting magical effects, and quite a few that we looked at and wondered how on earth they had done it, but they did not compensate for the small difficulty that the script and the acting were both dire.
The plot was a long incomprehensible monologue of Harry Potter’s guilt about being the only person who had not been eaten by Voldemort, and about his general lack of parenting skills, and other middle-class-white-male-middle-aged-wizard guilt.
This was accompanied by his once arch rival Draco Malfoy spouting similar tedium along the same lines, and occasionally speculating about whether or not he managed to demonstrate his love for his son in an adequate manner.
It is not difficult to demonstrate your love for your children. You do not go on about homework, even when they have not done it, and occasionally give them a tenner. On the whole that more or less covers it. You do not need to go and sit on their bed and agonise about your own childhood, and if you absolutely can’t stop yourself, once in a performance is quite sufficient.
Five or six times is very dull indeed by the end.
Every single character was a carbon copy of their film counterpart, except Hermione, who had inexplicably become black. You would have thought that this might have helped Harry Potter face his endlessly boring guilt complex, but it didn’t.
I don’t like virtue-signalling theatre which lectures me and very rapidly became cross with it.
I would not in the least have minded Hermione being black if she had been able to act, but she couldn’t, although this turned out not to be an especially distinguishing feature, because nobody could.
We had occupied the morning ambling contentedly around Covent Garden, which features all of my favourite shops, being Penhaligon’s, and Hotel Chocolat, and the place where we get our dressing gowns.
The sun was shining, and the world was interesting, and it felt odd to break off to sit in a dark theatre. I am no great lover of matinees generally, theatre is for the evening once you are past six years old, but it was such a long show that we had to start at lunchtime.
By the time we emerged at the end of the afternoon it was dark, and we were feeling a bit fuddled.
As it happened, my father had recommended a restaurant which turned out not to be far from the theatre, and by great good fortune it turned out to be very much better.
It was called Sarastro’s, and was decorated like an old-fashioned theatre, in red and gold, with crushed velvet tablecloths and interestingly guilt-free paintings everywhere.
The paintings were so guilt-free that there was a separate bathroom for children. The waiter suggested this for Oliver, but when Mark visited the grown-up bathroom, he told Oliver that he ought to go and investigate, so he did, and came out laughing.
He is a veteran of the mighty Internet, and hence unshockable.
We had an excellent dinner, with cocktails, and were enjoying ourselves so much that we were disappointed to realise that it was time to go back to the theatre for Part Two.
We came out still singing the songs from The Book Of Mormon, and entertained ourselves by working out exactly what had been wrong with it all the way home.
I had a good time anyway. It was spectacular, and clever, and we had popcorn flavoured with white chocolate and raspberry.
It has been a splendid day.
