SYNOPSIS

The musical opens in a courtroom, where Wiliam Samuel Ireland (spelled with one l) and his son Wiliam Henry Ireland stand accused of forging multiple works of Shakespeare in a civil lawsuit in late 18th century London. Samuel protests his innocence with growing desperation, while Henry sits silently, tense and anxious. Henry is portrayed as a timid boy expelled from school after school for having “too much imagination.”

The scene shifts to Samuel’s study, where he prepares for a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon and discovers that Henry has been expelled yet again. Henry joins the trip, and during their visit to Shakespeare’s birthplace, he finds a book of sonnets with a loose blank page — handed to him by a mysterious gentleman called H. Imagining the emotions in Shakespeare’s style, Henry writes out Sonnet 130 and signs it in Shakespeare’s handwriting.

When they return home, Samuel questions the paper, and Henry claims that H gave it to him and that it is an original Shakespeare document. Samuel, who has never acknowledged Henry as talented or capable, becomes fascinated. Henry continues creating more “undiscovered” Shakespeare pieces — letters, legal notes, even correspondence from the Queen.

Samuel, himself a failed writer, suddenly gains attention as the supposed descendant of the man who once saved Shakespeare’s life and was rewarded with documents by Shakespeare’s will 200 years ago. Newspapers begin to praise Samuel’s writing, now that he is associated with Shakespeare’s legacy.

Rumors continue to spread, and Samuel and Henry are brought to trial. Samuel insists the works are genuine and that they all came from H, whom he himself has never met. Before the trial begins, a swindler appears at the house claiming to be H and brings additional documents to “prove” the authenticity of the collection. Samuel accepts them and later uses them as supporting evidence in court. Henry, frightened, begins writing an original play, Vortigern and Rowena, hoping to prove he can create his own work. Samuel instead declares it a newly discovered Shakespeare play and submits it as further proof that all the pieces are real.

In the courtroom, the judge dismisses the trial as a waste of time, calling the manuscripts “obviously beautiful Shakespearean works.” But Henry finally confesses that he forged everything. The two are acquitted, yet Henry is sentenced for contempt of court and ordered to leave the country.

Samuel continues to profit from the forged documents, but evidence of fraud mounts. The ending suggests that Henry, possibly living quietly somewhere in rural France, might still become a writer — an unresolved, open ending.


REVIEW

William & Wiliam’s Wil(l)iam frames the famous Ireland forgery scandal as a study of authorship, validation, and the inherited hunger for recognition. Rather than approaching the material as a historical drama, the musical reshapes it into a psychological portrait of a father who wants fame and a son who wants approval, each reaching toward the name “William Shakespeare” as if it were a door to a different life. At the start of the show, the actors introduce the roles they are playing, openly acknowledging that the production may feel sketch-like and not strictly faithful to historical fact. The premise is rich: a courtroom thread, a fractured title that visually encodes identity, and a narrator-figure who speaks the brilliance the characters themselves lack. The show understands the questions it wants to raise, though the path from concept to stage is not always seamless.

The narrative introduces Henry Ireland as a timid boy repeatedly expelled from school for having “too much imagination.” But who expels a student for quietly imagining things? The show wants Henry to exist as a child whose inner world is unrecognized, and whose only survival mechanism becomes imitation. His tragedy is not that he fails, but that the world never asks for the full inner world he carries — the one laced into the study at home where he has an old helmet, road lamps imagined as constellations, and other scraps of borrowed grandeur.

A recurring prop, the discarded armor helmet, becomes Henry’s emotional armor. It is something thrown away, something hollow, something that once had purpose but is now only decorative — exactly how Henry believes his father sees him. Whenever he wishes to hide, he wears the helmet; whenever he wishes to speak, the mysterious gentleman H appears in his place. The device is clear: Henry cannot speak for himself, so he invents a version of himself who can. H becomes fluency, confidence, entitlement, authorship — everything Henry is not allowed to be. The musical never states outright that H is an alter ego, but the staging makes it unmistakable, especially because the actor playing H also performs multiple other roles — judge, narrator, aristocrat, and swindler. The result is theatrical shorthand for a fractured self.

The wordplay in the title — William, Wiliam, Wil(l)iam — suggests an opening question about authenticity and identity. The original Korean title 윌리엄과 윌리엄의 윌리엄들 could be translated literally as William and William’s Wil(l)iams or William and William’s Wiliams. I am noting that the English title William & Wiliam’s Wil(l)iam was taken from the officially licensed Japanese poster, as multiple variations have circulated and this one appeared as the most formal. In the script, Samuel explains that all the sons in their family have been named Wiliam (with one L) for generations, turning the “missing letter” into a point of identity rather than a spelling error. Because Wiliam is unconventional in the UK, the twist may feel culturally awkward — and for some viewers, the first association may not be Shakespeare at all, but Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, which was exactly my first reaction when I saw the Japanese promotional image.

The musical attempts to anchor itself in Shakespearean language by embedding familiar lines and motifs into the score. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” is sung, and other quotations appear as lyrical fragments. These references function less as intertextual commentary and more as recognition signals, depending on how well the audience knows Shakespeare. The show gestures toward Shakespeare, and the quotations generate atmosphere, but not inquiry.

The emotional core of the musical resides in the relationship between Samuel and Henry. Samuel repeatedly dismisses his son’s efforts, responding not with rage but with a quiet, suffocating command: “Do nothing. Just breathe.” The line feels more violent than shouting, because it asks the child to exist without leaving a mark. Henry’s forgeries are driven not by ambition but by desperation — the need to be seen not as a failure, but as someone capable of the impossible. When Samuel suddenly receives public praise through Shakespeare’s “rediscovered” manuscripts, the acclaim spills onto the father and the son merely a delivery system.

The courtroom scenes follow fictional logic rather than historical record. The judge refuses to question the documents because they look “too beautiful to dispute.” Henry confesses not for mercy but because he can no longer endure the gap between authorship and self. The verdict acquits both men legally but sentences Henry to exile in a civil court, a punishment that never occurred in reality. The real Ireland scandal unraveled through ridicule, not legal sentencing — but the musical favors courtroom clarity over historical messiness.

The production was staged in a small theatre with only piano and violin accompaniment, yet the music carried more weight than the plot. The score alternates between rhythmically playful, punch-driven numbers and a relaxed swing-like piece, giving the show a musical identity more secure than its dramatic one. The melodies are memorable, and the limited orchestration feels intimate rather than thin.

The casting was strong. The actor playing Henry has a warm vocal tone in the low and mid ranges, and his high notes and belts remained stable throughout. What made his singing engaging was not just accuracy but texture — a blend of airiness and density that reflected Henry’s internal hesitancy. His spoken pacing felt natural, and he avoided exaggeration. Samuel, by contrast, was written with a slightly comic edge: a stubborn, self-absorbed man who treats his son as background noise until fame arrives. The actor played him without cruelty or sentimentality, making him both recognizably human and theatrically irritating.

The performer playing H had the strongest stage presence and most resonant voice, though his sharply nasal, amplified breath intakes including the one before a long sustained final note, occasionally distracted from phrasing. Still, the three actors fit visually: Samuel looked like a father, Henry looked like a boy, and H — a character who can be played at multiple tonal registers — simply looked like H.

The musical has also been performed in Japan in Japanese translation, and this cross-cultural staging highlights something important: when a Korean creative team reframes a Western literary figure through a non-British perspective, the result is not simply an adaptation but a cultural detour. The story becomes less about Shakespeare as an English monument and more about how other cultures reinterpret him — freely, sometimes awkwardly, but with a different kind of honesty. The musical is not trying to recreate Shakespeare’s world or 18th-century London; it is trying to imagine what Shakespeare means to people who do not live inside it.

After the performance, an on-stage autograph session was held for a small group of selected audience members. It was a light, controlled moment — something rarely seen in Western productions except in charity events like Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS — and it gave the evening a sense of closeness that contrasted with the story’s themes of distance, fraud, and anonymity. The curtain call ended the show, but the autograph table briefly turned theatre back into human space — a reminder that the need for recognition, even in fiction, is never far from the need for connection.

The ending leaves Henry suspended in possibility — alive, removed from public disgrace, perhaps finally able to write something under his own name.