ROBIN EDWARDS
London

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

 

As soon as I heard that JK Rowling was doing a stage version of Harry Potter I knew I had to see it. I’m a massive Potterhead. I read all the books as a teenager and have watched all the films multiple times. Tickets were predictable extremely hard to come by, selling out in record times. I tried the Friday ticket ballot multiple times to no avail. Finally on the second big ticket release I scheduled it in my diary and got online and in the queue to big. Unfortunately I was something like number 38,000 in the queue. Annoyed I left for work, however on arriving back home from work that evening miraculously I was just nearing the front of the online queue. I was in and managed to book stall tickets for April. Only problem not April that year, but April 2018! Yes a full sixteen months away. I don’t think I’ve ever had to book anything that far in advance in my life ever before. Anyway after what seemed like an eternity the time came around. I took my school friend Rup with me, we’d both read the Harry Potter books at the same time so I knew he was also a massive Potterhead.

The play is split into two halves and we saw them on preceding days. After so much excitement I was worried I might be underwhelmed, I needn’t have been though the show was excellent. First off I have to give a shout out to the staging and the visual effects, which were the best I’ve ever seen on stage then or since. Apparently they spent a fortune on them and you can really tell, with a play about magic and wizardry you’d expect amazing special effect and that didn’t disappoint. Without giving too much away the scenes with the train and also the dementors were visually stunning. Actually left me in awe and scratching my head about how on early they achieved them. Honestly breathtaking. 

The actual play was great as well, no tired spin off here, the writing was spot on as you would expect from JK Rowling. I genuinely believe she could have spun off this story into a full blown additional Harry Potter film franchise it’s that good. I quite like the way she chose to do a theatre production instead though, I think she’s definitely encouraged a lot of younger people who may not have usually gone to see a theatre production to go see a play.

The play is very much a continuation of the books/ films though, so unless you’d seen them I think you may be a tad confused and struggle to follow the plot and what is going on. In fact so much went on I kind of want to see it again so I can study if again in more detail. Just have to try and get another ticket I suppose!

London

Temper Soho

I’d be wanting to try Temper for a while after hearing great reviews. The head chef, Neil Rankin, actually lives in my apartment building and used to host a supper clubs in his flat, though annoyingly I only found this out after he stopped doing them. So sadly I will never get to go, but I do have the option of going for dinner at one of his restaurants. Temper specialises in meat cooked over open pit fires. In the middle of this restaurant they have an open kitchen where you can sit and watch the chefs prepare, butcher and cook your food over fire right in front of you. It’s mainly sharing dishes, so we ordered 4 dishes between the two of us. We had one of their signature dishes, the cheeseburger tacos, which did indeed taste like a cheese burger. We also had a lovely crab and apple dish, which was really fresh and vibrant. The chef in front of us at the bar was grilling this amazing hunk of meat, we asked him what it was pork shoulder and he very kindly offered to carve us off a couple of slices. It was delicious. Fantastic meal, really recommend this place. My friend said it was the best restaurant he’d been to all year, which as endorsements go can’t get much better.