#anyway basically

Secondly, towards the end of the scene, Albus does the unthinkable – he disrespects the blanket. In a lot of portrayals, even Albus acknowledges that the blanket is a sacred object and takes care of it. There was one memorable performance in which Tom Mackley threw the blanket at Jamie Parker so hard that Jamie didn’t manage to catch it and it fell on the floor. The look on Albus’s face was so full of horror that he clearly understood the magnitude of what he’d accidentally done. But with Joe’s Albus, after a point he doesn’t seem to care anymore. It’s just a mouldy blanket after all. 

In the last performance I saw, once Harry got up off the bed and started talking about packing, Albus swung round to take up the whole space, which meant that he stretched his legs out down the length of the bed and right over the top of the blanket. He was essentially sitting on it, and Harry was absolutely livid. If he’d wanted to rile his dad up, he went about it in exactly the right way. 

Hogwarts through the trees

I’ve never seen this before, but in the performance on Thursday night, Albus somehow managed to enter this scene backwards. Normally the boys walk from the back of the stage into position facing forwards, so they see the view open up ahead of them, but in this one it seemed as though Albus was trying to avoid looking. He didn’t see the view until he was right in position beneath the arch, and then he turned round and his reaction was so sudden and so real. It was a burst of every emotion under the sun, hitting him all in that one moment. 

Joe’s expression in this scene is so profoundly beautiful. It’s everything and nothing all at once. Albus is overwhelmed by what he’s seeing, and he understands how stunning it is, and what it means to Scorpius, but his own relationship to the school is so complex that there’s heartbreak in there too. He wishes Hogwarts could be so uncomplicatedly beautiful to him as it is to Scorpius, but it’s not, and that really hurts. There are tears in his eyes, and he looks so small and sad and inadequate, but of course to Scorpius he’s anything but inadequate, even if he doesn’t realise it yet. Joe is a master of saying a thousand different things with one simple, restrained expression. 

Staircase ballet

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do anything that revolutionary character-wise in this scene, so it was actually a surprise to see Joe suddenly do something so different. He’s mentioned before that there are times he’s found the show’s blocking quite restrictive, and I wonder if now the directors’ attention is elsewhere he’s finally getting to show us the things he’s never been allowed to do before. 

He’s always got to the top of the first staircase and acted like he’s found an unexpected dead end, that’s nothing new (although I love how Albus’s path through the school is constantly blocked and thwarted, while the staircases take Scorpius wherever he wants to go – there’s a beautiful metaphor for their relationships with Hogwarts there). What was new was the moment when he ducks through the space beneath where Scorpius is sitting. 

Albus normally moves straight through that space and on up the stairs, but in this one he stayed under there and hid. He peeked out a couple of times to see if Scorpius was gone, clearly trying to avoid him, and when he realised that Scorpius wasn’t moving he sprinted straight up the stairs, like he was running away. 

It was all perfectly timed to the music still, and it was so interesting to see the choreography used to tell a new element of the story. Joe’s Albus’s story has always been that he’s trying to avoid and hide from Scorpius, he won’t even look at him, but this was a new extent. A new layer. 

Library scene 

There are two things to mention in this scene too. The first actually relates heavily to something in another scene. In the Act Four scene in Harry’s office, when Draco says ‘if its takes centuries, we must find our sons’, James has started grabbing the Time-Turner and getting ready to go, finger on the dial, about to search all of time for his son before Harry stops him. And in this scene, that was exactly what Albus tried to do too. 

The second he said ‘you’ve still got the Time-Turner, right?’ and grabbed it out of the bag, he went running across the room with it, finger on the dial, ready to go and get Cedric and Rose back. It changed the wrestling from being about pure ownership of the Time-Turner to being about Scorpius trying to stop Albus from doing something stupid there and then.

The second thing also requires a bit of background explanation. I’ve been furiously trying to figure out Joe’s library and torture scenes for the longest time, and it turns out that once you’ve understood one, you’ve understood them both. He explained to me at stage door that his Albus is a strategist. He doesn’t get scared, he just thinks – he suppresses his emotions in favour of coming up with a plan. So when you see him shutting down and not responding in the moment to Scorpius’s speech or to Delphi’s torture, it’s because Albus is five steps ahead and choosing to delay his emotions for another time. 

More on the torture scene later, but in the library scene he shuts down the second he sees Polly leaving the room. Of course he’s listening to what Scorpius is saying, he’s taking it on board, but he’s aware that McGonagall is going to show up at any second and there’s no time to get emotional. He can’t fix Scorpius’s problems there and then; the top priority is to stop them getting separated again, and that’s exactly what he does. Only when they emerge from under the cloak does Albus finally respond, and what a response. 

In the last show it was actually the beginning of Albus’s apology that was most fascinating. He separated the thoughts about the cloak into two separate instances, so it became both a commentary on his relationship with James and a guilty admission of his own problems. The first part, from ‘Yes I stole this from James’ to ‘his trunk combination is the date he got his first broom’ was joking, mocking his brother, and it finished with a ‘how thick can you get?’ sort of ‘duh’. Then there was a long pause before the second part: ‘I found the cloak made avoiding bullies easier’, which was said so quietly, reluctantly almost, like he didn’t want to admit that he’d had to hide. Maybe he was embarrassed to talk about his life being rubbish after everything Scorpius just said...

Torture scene

I discovered a couple of weeks ago that there’s one line that unlocks Joe’s delivery of the torture scene: ‘The flaw in the Time-Turner, the five minute rule, we do everything we can to run down the cloak’. In that performance it wasn’t a desperate half-baked suggestion being flung out, it was a strategy that Albus had been thinking through since he realised what Delphi was going to do, and he was counting on it to work. 

Everything that comes before that – Scorpius being tortured, Craig’s death, Delphi’s jeering – is all something that Albus can’t bring himself to engage with, because he’s focusing on the goal, which is for him and Scorpius to survive the preamble, get Delphi into the maze, and then lead her a merry dance for five minutes so they get timed out and she can’t use that task to save Cedric. Once again he’s five steps ahead. He has to be. That’s how he’s going to survive this hell, and more importantly it’s how Scorpius is going to survive it.

It isn’t until the moment when Delphi out-manoeuvres him and smashes the Time-Turner that he’s out of control. That’s when the emotion finally kicks in, when suddenly he has no plan at all, his dad is suddenly in horrible danger, and he and Scorpius are lost. 

I’ve found over the last year that if Joe’s not delivering what you expect emotionally from Albus in a situation, there is always, 100% of the time, a really good reason for that. The tricky thing is finding it, but when you do? It’s the most rewarding and exhilarating thing in the world. 

Harry and Ginny find the blanket message

This may be strange to say, but this has truly become one of my favourite scenes in the show with this cast (this and the hospital wing scene have both been unexpectedly gorgeous this year). 

The reason I adore this scene so much is because it’s such a clear assertion from Albus of how he feels about his dad. It’s the moment when Albus decides that he’s going to reach out and repair their relationship, come hell or high water. 

‘We’re starting with Dad’ is the most stunning line. It would be so easy, as Scorpius suggests, to write Harry’s name on the blanket, but Albus is absolutely determined that it’s going to be Dad. Because Harry is his dad, his dad who he loves and misses and wants so desperately. It’s Albus offering the first hand of peace across time and space, from Godric’s Hollow in 1981 to his own bedroom in 2020. There’s something so powerful about that.

The other powerful little gesture in this scene is in a similar vein. Whenever Joe’s Albus sits on a bed, he flips the pillow up so it rests against the bedstead, every single time, and in the last show I noticed that he did it here too. I couldn’t work out at first why that had such an impact, but then @ohscorbus mentioned that Albus doesn’t go back to his room after he runs away in the blanket scene. In fact no one goes in until Harry and Ginny do on Hallow’s Eve to find the blanket, and when they do, Albus is with them, if not in body then in spirit. 

It’s another little act of ownership, it feels like. The only thing that’s been touched in that room is the blanket, which is still at this point very much Harry’s possession – I doubt Albus feels an ownership over it, especially after how he treated it – so the first person to move anything is Albus, across space and time, and it’s to make the space more comfortable for himself. It’s one of those little things that he’d do to take ownership of the room if he were really there and planning to sit on the bed and do homework or whatever. 

Albus taking up his own space, taking ownership of it, inhabiting it, is so important a step for him. He’s uncomfortable and unhappy everywhere it seems, and little things like that feel like a step on the journey towards feeling better.

The penultimate scene