Rated 🍯🍯🍯🍯🍯
This was of the most memorable and joyous theatre experiences the Bee has ever had!
(Creatives spoiler). Flawless execution, if ever there was one. Wingardium Leviosa, and objects flying. People flying. People suspended mid air without a string or any supporting mechanism visible even to those seated just 5 feet away from the actors. Dementors flying overhead above the audience, so close you worry for your soul! Sparks and bright lights emanating from wands. Polyjuice potion and one person transforming - in front of your very eyes - into another, executed so perfectly it’s really like watching real magic. Just stunning.
And then there’s the nostalgia of countless childhood days spent reading and re-reading the Harry Potter books to the point that you feel you’re best friends with the characters. So you instantly connect with the characters as soon as they make their appearance on stage. You feel close to them. Like you’ve known them all their lives, and all your life. Aided by the fact that the stage actors are Doppelgängers of their movie counterparts, as you can see from the picture. Stage Harry looks so much like Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry, it’s eerie. Add to this all the Harry Potter theme music, and you realise no matter how much you thought you’d outgrown your Harry Potter crazy-diehard-fan phase, there’s always a part of it that lives on.
The inside of Palace theatre looked quite Hogwarts-y, as you can see from the picture. The Bee was fortunate enough to be one of the winners of the Friday Forty lottery (available on TodayTix) so it and a companion bee got to watch both parts 1 and 2 from the stalls, second row from the stage. All for just £40 pp. The show and seats made for such a magical experience that after experiencing almost 6 hours of the most spectacular, immersive theatrical experience the Bee has ever had in all its theatre-loving life, it felt almost bad about how little it was paying to watch this wonder!
PS: Check out the bee's comprehensive guide to theatre ticket lotteries.
The Bee had read the book when it first came out but had entirely forgotten the plot and characters, so much so that it didn’t even remember that the story was about Harry’s kids. Watching the plot unfold without knowing what was going to happen kept the Bee at the edge of its seat throughout. The Bee knows quite a few people read the book and didn’t think it was anything exceptional. That was the Bee's initial reaction too. Well, it gets why now. This story is meant to be witnessed on stage. Absorbing the story from the pages of book without a spectacular stage performance with magical special effects and unbelievable optical illusions to go with it can be rather underwhelming.
(Plot spoiler) But the Bee couldn't help but be bothered by the fallacies of time travel. As with any work of fiction that deals with time travel, there are obviously logical fallacies in the idea that anyone could go back in time and alter the course of events. What if the traveler alters the past to such an extent, that the ripple effect of it on the future is so dire that the traveler does not exist in the future anymore? Then there's no-one who can go back in time to change the past. And yet the past is different.
(Plot spoiler) Incidentally, that does happen in the story with one of the characters, but to think that the other characters who survive in the new reality can simply go to another point in the past and change another event to redirect the course of history back to one in which the missing character would eventually be created, is, well, absurd obviously.
But I guess if you’ve decided to watch a time travel piece then you really shouldn’t be expect to be persuaded of the logical consistency of the exercise. The Bee loved the acting, the music, the set, the venue, the vibe, the seats and the price it paid for those seats. Enough said.
Five stars.
Watched 14 May 2022 at the Palace Theatre, London.
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