Goleby has been with the show since it opened here in February 2019. “It’s been part of our lives for such a long time, and so many things have happened,” she says – such as the arrival of her firstborn child midway through the play’s pandemic lockdown hiatus. “We’ve had births, we’ve had deaths, we’ve had marriages. We’ve been a part of this [Harry Potter] world longer than we were at drama school.”
There are moments from the old version she misses, she admits. But the shorter version still feels like the “same journey”. It’s not only the script that’s changed. The arrival of her child changed her relationship to her onstage son Albus: “I realised that what I was saying, what I was doing, was advocating for him,” she says.
And Ginny’s onstage relationship with Harry deepened, too, as Goleby came to appreciate the challenges of co-parenting. The revised show, she says, is “a more genuine reflection of them as a couple and as parents”. They have even come up with new dialogue, invented in the re-rehearsals with license from the international creative team. And she still finds the show an adrenaline hit to perform.
“Just about every scene has magic, or a technical element that you just have got to be on top of,” she says. “There’s no ‘kind of getting it right’ with magic, it’s either going to work or not … You just suppress [the adrenaline rush] until you need it, use it when it’s useful, and move on.”
Unlike Goleby, Lachlan Woods is joining the cast for the first time, as Malfoy. His choreography for the fight scene is different to his predecessor’s: “a little bit supercharged, a little bit more gritty, more street fighter”, he says. But for him, the show is all new. “There’s a lot more fire than I had anticipated. Flammable liquids and gases.”