Saturday 2 June 2018

PUFFS review

I am not a Harry Potter fan, and I say that having never read the books or watched the movies, but the story of a boy wizard and magic spells have never interested me. That is, until I saw PUFFS or Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic. Set during Harry and friends' time at said school of magic, PUFFS focuses on another student who was around at the time of Harry's reign, Wayne, and his friends who had been assigned house Puff, the house that no one really wants to be assigned.

Written by Matt Cox, PUFFS is littered of Harry Potter references and in-jokes, and while some of them went over my head, if you are at all familiar with the tropes of such stories, then you will still find yourself laughing along. Cox isn't just making cardboard cutouts of fantasy stories in his play, but creating fully fleshed out characters with motivations and desires that you find yourself supporting wholeheartedly. This is done so carefully and considered, that you don't realise how emotionally attached you are to the characters until the final genuinely suspenseful scenes.