Potted Potter

Spoiler alert: the Potted Potter show coming to Hong Kong later this month does not actually contain Harry Potter, or not in the way that potted shrimps contain shrimps, or potted plants contain plants.

Instead, this is the "officially unauthorised" version of the books. It's less of a faithful abridgement than a pantomime-style commentary by two anarchic former children's television presenters. Daniel Clarkson created the show about six years ago with fellow actor Jefferson Turner, compressing all of the Potter books into 70 minutes.

"My flat doesn't have any phone signal, so I am hiding under a tree in Central Park because the forecasts warned about thunderstorms. The glamorous life I lead," Clarkson says, speaking from New York, where the show is proving a sell-out this summer. On the line, the 33-year-old has a tinny voice that could belong to one of the magical creatures in J.K. Rowling's fantasy world of wizards.

The show started in 2005, when the sixth Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was about to be published. Clarkson had a meeting in London with a friend who works in public relations, to discuss performing something at the launch at a bookshop in Oxford Street.

"We had come up with this idea of doing all the books in five minutes. I left that meeting thinking that I needed another actor to do this with me. Then I walked through Covent Garden and saw Jeff doing street theatre," Clarkson says.

"If you squint and look the other way, Jeff kind of resembles Daniel Radcliffe. We got chatting, and it just happened to be perfect timing. We did that short piece, and then we built it up into an hour-long show."