Harry Potter play to open at Palace Theatre in 2016

JK Rowling's boy wizard will hit the stage in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany at the Palace Theatre, London in Summer 2016.

Thorne and Tiffany worked together on John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, which ran at the Apollo Theatre last year, and are now set to tell the story of Potter's pre-Hogwarts years in a production co-produced by Rowling along with Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender.

According to the Daily Mail, one of the play's themes will be exploring what happened to Harry’s parents before they were killed by Lord Voldemort.

Author JK Rowling shed a little more light on the project on her twitter this morning:

It will tell a new story, which is the result of a collaboration between writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and myself. #CursedChild

However, I can say that it is not a prequel! #CursedChild

To answer one inevitable (and reasonable!) question – why isn’t #CursedChild a new novel? – I am confident that when audiences see the play

they will agree that it was the only proper medium for the story. #CursedChild