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‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’: Fans Left Fuming Over Exorbitant Secondhand Ticket Prices

By Soumashree Sarkar
Published on: 19:06 PST, Aug 6, 2016

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets have begun appearing on resale sites in bulk and at expensive prices, leaving many Potter fans without a ticket to the West End play.

The initial 250,000 tickets officially released yesterday were all sold out within hours, but secondhand tickets began appearing on sites other than the two listed on the official website of the play.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child book realease. [Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty Images]
The tickets to the two-part show in London’s Palace Theatre are priced between £15 and £70 per part on the official selling outlets of Nimax Theatre and ATG Tickets.

There are also tickets priced at £20, £40, £55 and £65 — all of which have been sold out. However, the tickets which have since appeared on secondhand websites are priced at rates ranging from £200 to even £1000.

According to The Telegraph, these tickets, which the young Harry Potter fan base has largely been unable to afford, are being sold on resell sites like eBay and Stubhub.

The Palace Theatre in London, where the wildly anticipated and well-received play is being staged, has a maximum seating capacity of 300.

However, as reported by the BBC, the authorities behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child have not been entirely enthusiastic about resell site tickets.

In a statement, the official spokesperson revealed that there is a chance that holders of secondhand Cursed Child tickets may be refused entry by the play’s authorities.

“Tickets purchased through either of our official ticketing platforms must not be sold or advertised for sale on the internet, in newspapers or elsewhere. Any ticket advertised for sale in this way will be automatically void.”

Hailed as a visual delight full of artistic set designs that make it a magical marvel, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play written by Jack Thorne, adapted from an original short story by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Thorne himself.

The play text released on July 31 became the fastest selling British book in a decade.

In it, Harry Potter makes a return to the magical universe that has seemingly undergone a sea of changes since the last page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the last of the books in the original Potter series.

Readers with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Cursed Child a little after midnight at Foyles book store on July 31, 2016 in London. [Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty Images]
Although the book has failed to allure readers in the same way the previous seven had, the play is being touted as not only immersive as an experience, but a game changer when it comes to family entertainment in the theater.

For older fans who have grown up reading the Harry Potter books, the play is an extension of the magical world of Potter and his friends. For newer readers, it is an unmissable event to complement their Potter mania.

In order to make it easier for fans who have been disappointed in interminable queues, Cursed Child releases 40 tickets at 1 p.m. GMT every Friday for the performances of the coming week.

They are labelled “The Friday Forty” and are also moderately priced.

These tickets are an assortment of seat types and are the fans’ only hope for being part of the audience in the near future.

The seats were up for grabs at 11 a.m. on August 4, and according to The Independent, even those who had registered hours in advance and were patiently waiting ahead of the stipulated time were let down by the mad scramble.

However, fans will have to show the debit or credit cards which have been used to purchase the ticket, or at least the email of confirmation, for the authorities to make sure that tickets have been purchased legally and from legitimate sources.

There was no stopping the jubilant chosen few who did manage to secure tickets to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. As disappointed fans rallied against the injustice done to them, others vowed to keep on trying to purchase tickets.

[Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images]

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