FF - Nine Day Wonder

Nine Day Wonder is a comedy taking place in the present and the past.

When Will, a contemporary man, is faced with a moment of ultimate crisis, to distance himself from reality he splits in two, becoming Will Kemp, Shakespeare’s famous fool. In 1599, though no one is quite sure why, Kemp undertook his famous dance, jigging his way from London to Norwich, a hundred and twenty-five miles distant. In present-day Will’s imagination, history is turned upside-down as Kemp refuses to leave the stage quietly, instead insisting hoping he can make Shakespeare change his mind, beg him to return, so he can be again be the star he once was. Fighting his way through Kemp’s egomania, jokes, dances, bad puns, bragging, and foolery, Will is finally forced to confront his own ambition.

The phrase, nine days’s wonder, at least as Shakespeare used it in 3 Henry VI, seemed to be a court-imposed period of public shaming, when the condemned, dressed in a sheet, was forced to walk about the streets to be jeered at and perhaps worse. It has since come to mean something closer to a ‘flash in the pan’, something that makes a big first impression, rapidly fading without a trace: much as how Will sees his life.