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. Recently, he has 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 Chawawa 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 Chawawa, 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," Chawawa 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.'" Chawawa 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 Chawawa 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.
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