Do the new Harry Potter kids face an impossible task?

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Hello, and welcome back to the IndyArts newsletter. Louis Chilton on dispatch duties this week. I started out the week at the Hay Festival, partnered this year with The Indpendent. Now I'm back, but the festival's still ongoing – some of my colleagues from the desk are currently out there enjoying the fun and literary stimulation to be had near the Welsh border. 

What's gone on this week? It was the finale of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder's utterly sui generis reality/prank show. I don't think there'll be a more fascinating piece of television this year, and I cannot recommend that whole series highly enough. The forthcoming Harry Potter reboot cast its new trio of leads – putting them in a rather impossible position, as Phil Harrison argues. "The increasingly Voldemort-like presence of JK Rowling" is, he writes, "going to loom over the whole production… it's impossible to imagine that the new cast (including the blameless children leading it) aren't going to be asked about this stuff." 

Roisin O'Connor wrote brilliantly about the Irish trad revival currently underway, speaking to a bunch of musicians and figures from within the scene. Isabel Dempsey dug into the rom-com musical boom that's taking the West End by storm. And – in what is surely something that I will be blabbing on about for the rest of my waking life – I interviewed Jackie Chan (!!!). Also Ralph Macchio and Ben Wang, his co-stars in the new Karate Kid sequel.

More stuff below, including some really terrific features from the culture desk.

Hasta la pasta,

Written by Louis Chilton

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