The author, director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne spent two years collaborating on The Cursed Child. On the eve of the theatrical event of the year, they discuss bringing the Potter magic to the stage… • Children’s authors’ debt to JK Rowling: ‘She brought back storytelling’

John Tiffany is kneeling at the feet of JK Rowling. “Look, I’m bowing before you,” he says, grinning broadly as he struggles up from the floor. “I have it written into my contract that people must kneel to me wherever I go,” she says, laughing.

This gentle horseplay, for the sake of the Observer photographer, who has asked Tiffany to crouch on an uncomfortable box in order to make a rising scale of elevation for his picture, reveals the warmth and ease of the relationship between the creator of Harry Potter and the director who is about to bring a new story to the stage in the form of a play called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Playwright Jack Thorne, who has been entrusted with the task of actually writing the script, joins in the fun. “Before we go any further, I apologise for my height,” he says, looming over both of them.

They are an unlikely threesome: Rowling, blond, manicured and glamorous in a sandy wraparound dress and matching boots; Tiffany, a smiling scruff, in jeans and a jacket; Thorne skinny, balding and youthfully casual, with an intense gaze. Yet the friendship and ease between them bodes well for the collaboration that has sustained them for more than two years – and which on Tuesday is unveiled for the first time as previews get under way.

The production, in the shape of two interlinked plays, at a specially revamped Palace theatre in London, is by some distance the theatrical event of the year. Ever since Rowling announced last June that a play about her beloved boy wizard would be opening in 2016, speculation has been fevered. The anticipation has been increased by the fact that the clues dropped, mainly via Twitter, have been few.

All we know for sure is that the action begins some time near the point the epilogue for the seventh and final novel – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – left off. In those final pages, we saw a grown-up Harry, now married to Ginny Weasley, seeing their middle son Albus Severus off to Hogwarts. Ron is there with his wife, Hermione, waving off their daughter, Rose. And there too is Scorpius, son of Harry’s former adversary Draco Malfoy.

The website doesn’t offer much more help. There we learn that Harry now works for the Ministry of Magic and must grapple “with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs” and that Albus “must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted”. The taster ends: “As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.” Such slender strands of revelation nevertheless triggered a rush for seats that set a West End record – 175,000 tickets in 24 hours – and this in spite of the fact that fans had to buy tickets for two plays in order to experience the whole story.

Even in this, the only interview Rowling, Tiffany or Thorne will give before the show opens, a voluntary vow of silence about the plot is observed. “The epilogue of the seventh book is a very clear pointer as to where I was interested in going,” Rowling offers, slowly. “It’s very obvious from that epilogue that the character I was most interested in was Albus Severus Potter. And you see Scorpius on that platform.” She sits back, smiling, Sphinx-like.

I’ve been awake since 4am. Last night I saw a scene that’s very close to my heart, and it was quite overwhelming

We meet in a London club near the theatre, just 13 days before the first preview. Expectation is heating up – and not only among the audience. “I’ve been awake since 4am,” says Rowling. “We were in the theatre last night and I saw a scene that’s very close to my heart, in costume, on the set And it was quite overwhelming.”

“Jo has been around for a lot of the process,” Tiffany chips in. “A lot,” she agrees. “But last night was the first time I had been into the theatre and seen everything so fully realised. And it was… extraordinary.”

“We did a fist bump, didn’t we?” says Tiffany, smiling.

“Well, I tried to do a fist bump with you,” Rowling shoots back. “And you tried to shake it. So that wasn’t our coolest moment. But in fairness it was dark…” “And I am not known for my first bumps,” says the director. “Nor am I, really,” adds Rowling. “I just felt the moment demanded one.”

This is how the conversation progresses, with a lot of laughter that feels real rather than nervous. Thorne reminds Tiffany that he had asked never to be told the number of days to curtain up, although it has relentlessly ticked down in hours, minutes and seconds on a panel on the ticket website. Yet Tiffany seems a model of relaxed confidence. “If you had asked me a year ago how I’d be feeling today, I think I’d probably have said I would be crumbling biscuits in the corner. But I feel remarkably sane.”

“You are so calm,” Rowling interjects. “I am less calm.”

The starting point for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was a meeting between Rowling and Sonia Friedman, the producer. Rowling explains: “You can probably imagine I have been asked to do something else with Harry Potter five times a week ever since the series ended. Sonia just wanted to explore a theatrical production and I knew her by reputation obviously and thought I would really like to meet her and hear what she had to say.”

The meeting went well and soon Friedman was suggesting bringing in Tiffany, whose own career has involved a fair amount of magic, as he has conjured theatrical gold in plays such as Black Watch, the musical Once and the haunting vampire tale Let the Right One In, which Thorne adapted from the Danish novel and film. Rowling knew Tiffany’s work and had also watched the rising arc of Thorne’s career, as the writer for TV of This Is England, The Last Panthers and The Fades and of distinctive stage plays such as Hope (about local government budget cuts, also directed by Tiffany) and The Solid Life of Sugar Water.

The idea of telling a new story with such collaborators began to appeal. “That’s the reason this happened because I thought I will never have the opportunity to work with such great people again,” she explains.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Noma Dumezweni (Hermione), Jamie Parker (Harry) and Paul Thornley (Ron) at the Palace Theatre. Photograph: Simon Annand

When she met Tiffany, she realised she had encountered him before – in the mid-90s when she was an impoverished single mother, writing what became the first Harry Potter novel over cooling cups of coffee in three Edinburgh cafes. One of her favourite haunts was the Traverse theatre, where Tiffany was assistant director. “It was one of the first places in Edinburgh you could have a cappuccino,” remembers Tiffany. “I was there meeting actors and writers a lot, and I remember seeing a woman writing, with a pram at her side. We got to saying hello and I remember once Jo said, ‘Do you mind if I’m here…’”

“Because I hadn’t bought a lot of coffee,” she explains, before Tiffany adds: “Then a year or so later I realised who it had been. And she didn’t come to the Traverse any more.”

While Rowling began her ascent to millionaire superstardom and much-loved icon status through the seven Harry Potter novels and the eight films based on them, Jack Thorne was lapping up the results. “I was a total Potterhead,” he says with a broad smile. “I still consider myself a Potterhead and I hope the Potterheads don’t hate me so much after this that I am never allowed to be one again.”

He was slightly too old to be one of the children queuing in bookshops at midnight for each release of a Potter book – those kids who are now aged between 25 and 30 and who make up the most excited segment of the audience for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Yet he was a self-described “fantasy nerd” who slavishly read each novel and went to see each movie as it came out. “On my own in a Ghostbusters T-shirt, so people would realise I was there for the genre,” he says, with another grin.

Tiffany didn’t know about this background of fandom when he asked Thorne to come on board as the writer of The Cursed Child. “He asked me when we met at the tube station on the way to The South Bank Show awards,” remembers Thorne. “So glamorous,” laughs Tiffany. “And so appropriate, the tube station,” adds Rowling mysteriously. Thorne continues: “And he said, ‘What do you think about it?’ And I went a bit nuts in the street. Only because I’m so incredibly shy, nobody would have seen or realised I was going nuts.”

When he and Tiffany went to meet Rowling at her Edinburgh home, it was clear the empathy between them ran deeper than that simply between a fan and an author. “Jack and I are similar in many ways,” says Rowling. “We’re both, notwithstanding how chirpy we are being right now, quite introverted people who are very happy alone in a room, and there are many parallels in our working practices and I felt like he was one of my tribe.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jamie Parker, Sam Clemmett and Poppy Miller as Harry, Albus and Ginny Potter in the new stage version.

“And we bonded over the haircut,” he adds, before asking her permission to tell the following story. “We were talking about the way people don’t realise quite how horrible age 10 is. That was the moment I realised it was possible I could never have friends. Other people would have friends and I never would. And I was talking about buying a coat: I bought the same coat as Matt Cox, who was a considerably cooler kid in the year and I had to wear it to school every day because my mum had bought it for me and it was the only coat I was going to get. He wore it a lot better and everyone thought I was copying him.”

He still shudders at the memory. Then Rowling adds, quickly: “And I had exactly the same experience. I had the same feather cut at 10 as Susan Hook. I went into school and everyone thought you are trying to be Susan Hook, you pathetic human being. We had exactly the same experience of being deeply uncool. And that’s what haunts you.”

That sense of isolation goes to the heart of the appeal of the Harry Potter universe – why it has been greeted with such love. “When you’re growing up it’s very easy to feel lonely and insecure,” says Tiffany. “And what Jo managed to capture, I think, was a world which made those people feel less lonely.”

“Absolutely,” adds Thorne, as Rowling listens intently. “I’ve just had a little boy and my wife and I called him Elliott because ET sort of saved my life because that film is absolutely about something being out there that’s greater than yourself. It’s the same with Harry and Hermione – there’s a sense about the possibilities of the world. Jo just weaved this magical spell and it is a wonder of a work.”

The depth of such identification is what makes Rowling so solicitous of her fans. “I never set out to build a big community, but I don’t think there is a writer alive who wouldn’t want to have that many people react to their work,” she says. “That’s what happened. People came inside the world with me.

“What Jack says about ET… this is why he is the right man for the job, because he just gets it. That’s pitch perfect. The big reason why people loved Potter was that it felt like it could be. That sense that there is more to the world. Just on the other side. Even within touching distance. There’s more. It is the promise of another world and it doesn’t have to be a magical world but to a lonely child or an insecure person or anyone who feels different or isolated, the idea of having a place where you do belong is everything.”

It was 17 years, and just because I’ve stopped on the page doesn’t mean my imagination stopped

The trust and understanding between the collaborators has formed the bedrock of their joint creation of The Cursed Child. Over a series of conversations, and chunks of writing, Rowling contributed ideas. But she is quite clear that the play is written by Thorne. “From the moment he produced the first outline, I thought bingo, that’s it.” Did she never imagine writing the play herself? After all, her other major project this year is her debut screenplay for the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, telling of the adventures of Newt Scamander in 1920s New York, decades before Harry Potter reads his book at school.

“I am not so arrogant that I think when you’ve got an absolutely top-class playwright offering to do it that I’m going to say, ‘Well, I’ve never done it before but I’ll do it.’ It’s a question of knowing the limits of your own competence. I was reasonably involved in the Potter scripts. I’m more familiar with that world. I felt a degree of confidence writing a screenplay but I had supreme confidence that Jack was going to write the play that I was going to love and he has. So you can’t ask fairer than that.”

Before I met JK Rowling, the question I most wanted to ask was why she can’t resist returning to stories of her most famous creation. After all, she has forged a very successful post-Potter career as author of adult novels such as The Casual Vacancy, and the detective series featuring Cormoran Strike, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, books that enable her to explore more violent themes and display her predilection for tight plotting. The latest, Career of Evil, was last week nominated for an award.

Yet having met her, it’s clear that Harry Potter has never really left her. “It was 17 years and just because I’ve stopped on the page doesn’t mean my imagination stopped,” she says. “It’s like running a very long race. You can’t just stop dead at the finishing line. I had some material and some ideas and themes, and we three [she nods at Tiffany and Thorne] made a story.”

It has been almost a decade since she put pen to paper for the final book in the sequence. “But I carry that world around in my head all the time,” she acknowledges. “I am never going to hate that world. I love that world. But there are other worlds I want to live in too. To be perfectly honest, I just feel if I enjoy it, I’ll do it – and if I don’t, I won’t.”

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In fact, with the play and the screenplay, 2016 has turned out to be what she describes as “such a wizardy year”. “I always said never say never, and the reason I said that was truthfully that I did have this residue in my head in both directions – in Fantastic Beasts…, which is going back, and in this play, which is going forwards. So I still had this material in my head.

“It’s been amazing because there are roots over there and shoots over here, so it is keeping it very consistent and doing it all at the same time. We are sharing a lot between the worlds.”

For all that, she has been insistent that there could not simply be an eighth novel – or equally that she would not remake an existing Harry Potter story in a new medium. “I kept being asked whether I would make a musical and I don’t like musicals,” she says, grimacing. “Theatre, on the other hand, I love. I find it a seductive world – there is nothing like seeing an actor perform live. But I had never had anyone approach me or propose anything that excited me like this.

“I think that, as a theatrical experience, as a play, it will be unlike anything people have seen before. And once people have had this theatrical experience, they will understand why this was the perfect medium for the story.”

Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany began talking and sharing ideas more than two years ago. Quite early in the process, after batting ideas backwards and forwards and holding an early workshop, they reached a crunch point where they realised that the story they were planning was too long to fit into a single evening. “You would have had no space for character,” says Thorne. “It would just have been plot, plot, plot.”

Tiffany explains: ”Where film can eat up story, theatre needs space and breath. Once we thought of doing it in two parts, it felt naughty to begin with, but we felt we didn’t want to short change the story. We were very nervous up until the moment when the audience started to buy tickets, and the response was overwhelmingly fantastic, because the fear was that people would think we were just exploiting this. But it wasn’t that in any way, shape or form.” Rowling adds: “We had space to do what we were talking about doing.”

Ticket prices have been kept relatively low – 250 seats for each performance cost £20 or less, and it’s possible to see both parts for £30. (There is no obligation to book both parts of The Cursed Child, although 98% of those booking so far have done so.) Top price seats are £65 per show. The producers won’t discuss pricing, but by comparison, it’s also £65 for the best seats to see Kenneth Branagh in The Entertainer, while the upper limit at The Book of Mormon is £150.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Noma Dumezweni as Hermione. ‘The best actress for the job,’ says Rowling

So controversy over the length has, on the whole, been averted. Controversy over the casting, on the other hand, has not. When it was announced that Jamie Parker would play Harry, Paul Thornley would be Ron and Noma Dumezweni was Hermione, all the attention focused on the news that a black actor was to play one of the wizarding trio. On social media, though the majority reaction was positive, there was a strong negative undertow. Was Rowling surprised?

“With my experience of social media, I thought that idiots were going to idiot,” she says. “But what can you say? That’s the way the world is. Noma was chosen because she was the best actress for the job. When John told me he’d cast her, I said, ‘Oh, that’s fabulous’ because I’d seen her in a workshop and she was fabulous.”

Unknown to Tiffany, when he made his casting call, there had in fact been a “black Hermione” theory around in Potterworld for years. Yet the strength of reaction surprised him. “I am not as Twitter familiar as Jo and Jack, so I hadn’t encountered its dark side, which is just awful,” he says. “The anonymity breeds horrors so after a while I stopped reading it. But what shocked me was the way people couldn’t visualise a non-white person as the hero of a story. It’s therefore brilliant that this has happened.”

I decided to simply state quite firmly that Hermione can be a black woman, with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm

Rowling agrees. She says there was always the possibility of Hermione being black in the way she was described; skin colour was never mentioned. “I had a bunch of racists telling me that because Hermione ‘turned white’ – that is, lost colour from her face after a shock – that she must be a white woman, which I have a great deal of difficulty with. But I decided not to get too agitated about it and simply state quite firmly that Hermione can be a black woman with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm.”

Tiffany has now worked on nothing except this project for two years, gathering around him a trusted team of collaborators. For Rowling, popping in and out of the process, watching him work alongside Thorne, has been an education. “It is a totally new language to me,” she says. “So watching Jack and what he can do on the page and his understanding on what will then translate on to stage has been such a revelation to me. I know novels and I know movies but this is a different world entirely. Jack has access to a paintbox that I don’t have because I don’t understand the medium.”

Thorne smiles. “To be honest, ever since I wrote Let the Right One In, I’d write something like, ‘They run through a forest and then are strung up on a tree and brutally murdered’. I’d just write it on a page and make John do it. And he does.”

What inspires creator, director and writer is the thought that, just as the Harry Potter novels encouraged a generation to read, so this Harry Potter play might introduce a new audience to theatre. Thorne says: “The phrase John hates more than any other is ‘I should go to the theatre more often’ because it contains the idea that going to the theatre is an obligation.” “Like eating your vegetables,” Rowling chips in. “Or going to church,” adds Tiffany. “And that,” continues Thorne, as if in three-part harmony, “is the death of theatre. This is an opportunity, I guess, to get people who don’t feel they should go to the theatre to go to the theatre, and then discover that they want to go to the theatre.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Palace theatre in London’s West End, where previews begin on Tuesday for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

That sense has encouraged Tiffany to make the experience as purely theatrical as possible. “Not a bombastic spectacle that makes people sit back,” he says. “It’s hopefully something that pulls you in. It is absurdly ambitious theatrically but it’s also about the audience and the imagination, which is exactly what a novelist does as well.”

As nearly two months of previews start, leading up to the official opening on 30 July, all hope that audiences will keep the show’s surprises secret. “I’ve been through this many times,” says Rowling. “And I hope we get there without any major spoilers, purely because people will have an amazing experience if they don’t know what’s coming.

“Generally speaking, Harry Potter fans are a community, they have each other’s backs, and they want to have that mystery and the sense of surprise. So we’re hopeful. But it won’t be the absolute end of the world. We’re not going to be throwing tantrums about it but we hope for the audience’s sake that we can get there.”

With that, they are off, back to the rehearsals, as the clock ticks down relentlessly, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child gets nearer to being the latest part of the Harry Potter story to emerge blinking into dazzling light.

Parts 1 and 2 of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child start previewing on Tuesday and Thursday respectively at the Palace theatre, London W1. The official opening is on 30 July. Throughout the run, 40 lower-cost tickets for each of the following week’s performances will be released every Friday at 1pm at harrypottertheplay.com