Would you pay £1,700 to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child?

Tickets for Harry Potter and the Curse Child are being sold for up to £1,700 on Ebay as desperate fans wait in hours-long online queues for a chance to see the play.

The eagerly-anticipated play opened at the end of July and is made up of two shows that the audience can watch on the same day or on two different dates – but tickets have proved difficult to come by.

On 4 August an extra 250,000 tickets for the show at the Palace Theatre, London were released to the public, but many fans were stuck for hours in an online queue with tens of thousands of people in the queue ahead of them.

One fan told IBTimes UK: "I got down to number 30,000 in the queue and then it closed. It must mean it's sold out."

Each Friday an additional 40 tickets are released on the website, but with so many people attempting to get their hands on one, the chance of getting a ticket in the near future seems low. And fans' desperation is prompting people to up the price of tickets they have bought and sell them on eBay for quite a profit.

While the cheapest tickets to see parts one and two of the play cost £15 per part, with more expensive tickets selling for £70 a pop, some of the double tickets featured on eBay are selling for 17 times that – with one set priced at £1,700.

And despite tickets on sale for performances up to 10 December 2017, when IBTimes UK joined the queue for the coveted tickets there were 191,563 people ahead in the queue – quite a wait for Harry Potter fans, with the cheapest tickets likely to sell out first.