Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Parenthood
Time, Mistakes, and the Past
Friendship, Family, Love, and Bravery
Reputation and Expectation
Death and Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
At the busy King’s Cross station in London, Harry Potter, his wife Ginny, his two sons James and Albus, and his daughter Lily enter with luggage trolleys. James is teasing Albus about his potentially being in Slytherin House at school, which makes Albus nervous. Harry tells James to give it a rest, and Ginny assures Albus that they’ll write to him as much as he wants—and that he shouldn’t believe everything his brother tells him about Hogwarts. With that, the family runs into the barrier between platforms nine and ten and disappears.
The play’s very first moments—which is the same scene depicted in the epilogue in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—establish some of the burdens of expectation that Albus carries. He worries about being placed in Slytherin, a house particularly notorious for dark wizards, because he wants to be placed in Gryffindor like his famous father. In this way, Albus hints at the fact that he feels a weight of expectation. It also sets up Harry and Albus’s dynamic at the beginning of the play, where Harry feels able to understand Albus’s nerves in going to Hogwarts because Harry similarly felt unsure of himself as a child, but in fact the root cause of Albus’s nerves is different from Harry’s.
Themes
