Online Reporter
LONDON.— Comedian, content creator and documentary maker Munya Chawawa became a star in the “golden era” of online video, but says his stage acting debut in Shakespeare is part of a move to “jump ship” from social media.
Munya, who was born in Zimbabwe and moved to the UK with his family when he was 11, has recently been immersing himself in footage of the UK’s 1990s illegal rave scene.
It was a time of hedonism and freedom surrounded by political and media panic —and is the setting for a modern take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Munya will appear.
“I’ve obviously done a super-deep dive into rave culture and watched loads of rave footage from all these little free parties where they would find an empty field,” he says.
While some footage exists of those illicit outdoor parties, they came before everyone had phones and cameras— and Munya, 33, feels a pang of nostalgia for that age of analogue abandon.
“I absolutely miss an era where we were dancing for ourselves and not for a digital world somewhere,” he says.
“We’re all phone addicts,” Munya continues. “The average person’s picking up their phone 200 times a day. I’m on a bit of a conscious mission at the moment to reduce that.
“And interestingly, the top comments under all the videos I’ve been watching are people who were at those raves saying, ‘I loved being able to dance, maybe get a little high, maybe get too sweaty for too long, and know there was no record of that.’”
Munya was in his teens when social media and smartphones took off, and says he “took for granted” the brief time before any and every fun occasion was recorded and posted for posterity.
If he ventures onto a dance floor now, he admits “my two-step has become a lot stiffer” out of anxiety that a wrong move could be filmed and send him viral.
“So yeah, I do definitely pine for those non-digital, in-person experiences, and I envy my parents for having them.”
This is coming from someone who owes his fame to the digital age, after making his name with comic videos as characters like upper-class drill rapper Unknown P and chef Jonny Oliver.
But Munya has since branched out from social media —making two Bafta-nominated TV documentaries, starring on Taskmaster and doing stand-up comedy.
“I’ve been making my short-form satirical videos for almost eight years now, creeping up to a decade,” he says. “I have a certain skill set that I’ve acquired there. It’s skyrocketed me to all the places I wanted to go.
“But I suppose the question at the beginning was always — if these sketches do work and they do catapult me into this new stratosphere of entertainment, where am I trying to land?”
The aim, he says, was to land on “something bigger and onto a new challenge” — such as theatre acting.
He’s starting by playing Bottom in Shakespeare’s romantic caper A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex.
In this 90s version, his character is a member of the Young Conservatives and is “a very political Bottom”, he says, while Theseus is a Tory MP who has shut down free raves in the county.
“I take it super seriously and I’m very studious when we’re in the room,” Munya explains of his preparations. “I’m taking notes. I’m learning all of these mad Shakespeare terms like couplets and quatrains and anacreontics and stuff that definitely sounds made up but isn’t.
“And I think also it’s the perfect time to maybe… jump ship, I think is the right word.
“Social media platforms and their algorithms have very much angled themselves against the creatives at the moment, I think.”
‘Lost in a sea of content’
He’s not jumping ship from social media completely, but says the online battle for eyeballs has “turned into a little bit of a dogfight, where even good stuff, even really consciously thought-out material, is just instantly swiped to the bottom of people’s pages”.
Munya thinks he was lucky to “enjoy the golden era of social media” before it became harder to cut through the noise.
“To be able to experiment, to be able to trial these characters and roll the dice on big ideas was fantastic because you were never getting lost in a sea of content. There’s some mad statistic about there being tens of millions of videos uploaded a day now —but at the time it was like, ‘I’m going to try this Jamie Oliver spoof or a Nigella (Lawson) character or the UK’s first posh drill rapper, what do you think?’ And it felt like the whole internet would give you feedback on that creative product.”
He adds: “I love the fact that social media has allowed me to have a career in stand-up, as a documentarian and now as an actor, so I don’t have any sort of resentment to it and how it’s changed.
“But what I will say is I was there as the sun was coming up on social media, and it was very fun.”
Munya fell in love with the theatre when he went to see The Lion King when he was 16 and realised it was like “the best movie you’ve ever seen, but in real life”.
However, returning as an adult, he felt out of place as a black man.
“In the shows I was going to, it didn’t feel as though they were too welcoming to me being there, just through the small social cues.”
He had a lightbulb moment after watching For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy by Ryan Calais Cameron, which “I still think is the best play I’ve ever seen”.
Munya found himself thinking, “I wish every black boy in the world could watch this play.”
So he took a group of teenagers to watch it, which he describes as “the most fulfilling and magical and deeply moving experience”.
Inspired by their reactions, Munya set up the Black Boys Theatre Club to take groups every month to plays ranging from Dracula to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest— followed by a post-show discussion in Nando’s.— BBC
Mathew Masinge