Zack Polanski’s one-man clown show

One benefit in being reasonably knowledgeable about history is that you don’t become overly concerned with passing fads. And Zack Polanski is certainly a fad. Like the hula hoop was in the 1950s, he is suddenly everywhere – on TV politics shows, in reports about rising Green membership numbers and polling figures, in videos incessantly served up by X’s algorithm. There’s already a subgenre of X posts grumbling about Polanski’s ubiquity.

I’m not so bothered. I recall the sadly neglected idiom, ‘Nine-Days Wonder’. Given its origin story, I can think of no one to whom it could apply more now than to the omnipresent Polanski.

The phrase was coined by the Elizabethan clown and well-known Shakespearean actor, Will Kempe, to describe his Morris dance from London to Norwich in 1600. This travelling gambol was an enormous popular sensation. Contemporary reports describe townspeople lining the roads and cheering Kempe on. He even performed before mayors and civic officials. The stunt was a real headline-grabber. Like Green memberships in 2025, Kempe’s pamphlet on his feat sold like hot cakes. And like the X users fed up with Polanski, the more discerning folk of the age must have similarly had their fill of it.

The success of the ‘Nine-Days Wonder’ must have been a relief for Kempe, if a short-lived one. The clown had recently been sacked from Shakespeare’s theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare wanted a break from Kempe’s simple rustic humour. Kempe, desperately searching for a new career opportunity, took up Morris dancing.

At least we can say that Kempe’s early career was a success. He left an indelible mark on our culture, creating such comic characters as the word-mangling Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. The Green Party leader has fallen into politics after a much less fêted spell on the boards.

Polanski did at least star in one budget feature, Art of Suicide, which has one glowing review on IMDB (apparently it has ‘Bohemian Rhapsodic profundity’). He played in some theatre productions. He boasts of his involvement with Team Angelica, a ‘radical arts organisation’, which he describes as doing ‘a lot of work around ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+’. Anyone familiar with the UK’s subsidised theatre will know that activity with this focus is hardly unusual.

Guido Fawkes last week resurfaced a clip of Polanski performing ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ at a Liberal Democrat conference in 2015. Zack ain’t no Marvin Gaye. He is, however, a recognisable figure to anyone who has wandered in the wilderness of the UK’s entertainment scene. We meet so many less-than-talented but overconfident wannabes in the performing arts. He has a certain swagger that bespeaks an entitlement to be on stage, though he shows no discernible gift for voice or movement. He reminds me of the boxer in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, who has only one problem: ‘You don’t know how to defend yourself and you don’t know how to attack.’ What Polanski lacks in artistic talent or political substance, he more than makes up for in confidence.

The success of Kempe’s travelling dance shows how many of us are willing to be distracted by the jingling bells and gaily flourished tatters that stream from a Morris dancer’s garb. And what are Green Party policies but bells and tatters? Polanski proposes a wealth tax, which will bring in at most a fraction of that needed to fund his spending plans. He promises borders so open that the world will come and go willy-nilly. He persists in reckoning that women can have cocks.

Polanski’s charisma and zeal attract attention, as do the colourful stories of his time as a breast-enlarging hypnotist. He’s the creature of the moment – smarmily sincere, perhaps, but essentially self-advertising. His appeal, like Kempe’s dance, depends on the crowd’s appetite for novelty. When the music stops, so will the attention.

After his Morris-dancing stunt in 1600, Will Kempe disappears from the historical record. Within just a few years he has faded into obscurity. Ditto, I’ll wager, Zack Polanski.

James Martin Charlton is an English playwright and director. Follow him on X @jmc_fire.