Harry flies into the West End: J.K. Rowling to co-produce magical new stage play based on her best-selling books

Author Rowling will collaborate with a playwright for the West End show

Play to focus on Harry Potter's early years, before his arrival at Hogwarts

Prominent producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender behind show



Warner Bros understood to be involved in development of new production

Just wizard: J.K. Rowling will co-produce a new play based on her Harry Potter tales, which is set to open in the West End within the next two years

Truly it’s beyond wizard. I can exclusively reveal that a play based on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales will open in the West End within two years.

Rowling will not write the stage piece — however, she will co-produce and collaborate with a playwright.

Rowling’s seven-volume Harry Potter series began with The Philosopher’s Stone, published in 1997.



All told the books have sold well in excess of 450 million copies and been translated into 77 languages.



Eight movies were made featuring Daniel Radcliffe as the boy wizard with the thunderbolt scar on his forehead, and Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, as Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, his best pals at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

But the play, to be steered by prominent London and New York producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, will mine (according to a statement sent to me, as a mudblood, by Owl Post yesterday) ‘the previously untold story of Harry Potter’s early years as an orphan and outcast’.



Although the statement didn’t spell it out, I understand that Warner Bros, the studio behind the Potter pictures, will be involved in the development of the theatre show, just as it was with the Sam Mendes musical version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, which is running at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Harry Potter’s theatrical adaptation will seek to ‘offer a unique insight into the heart and mind of the now legendary young wizard. A seemingly ordinary boy, but one for whom destiny has plans...’

Rowling noted the numerous approaches she has received about putting Harry Potter on the stage, but the vision put forth by Sonia and Colin ‘was the only one that really made sense to me, and which had the sensitivity, intensity and intimacy I thought appropriate for bringing Harry’s story to the stage.

After a year in gestation, it is very exciting to see this project moving onto the next phrase.’

Early years: A young Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter. The new show will focus on the previously untold story of Harry Potter's early years as an orphan and outcast

A theatre has yet to be negotiated, but with a show of this quality — almost a licence to print money if all involved get it right — hopefully the right spell will deliver a theatre exactly when the show’s ready to go in 2015.



Friedman is one of the producers behind The Book Of Mormon and the current hit Mojo, which co-stars Potter alumnus Rupert Grint, while Callender produced, with Richard Price, the TV version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s landmark adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby and landed Tom Hanks on Broadway this past season with Lucky Guy.



Such classy operators ought to be able to assemble an A-list creative team, and a writer and director will soon be contracted to begin developing the play.

The model has to be David Heyman, the movie producer behind Gravity, who acquired the rights to the Potter series and ensured that only the very best of British (and one or two from beyond our shores) were entrusted to make the movies.