Munya Chawawa trades social media for Shakespeare, seeking authentic human connection

Munya Chawawa built his name doing what social media does best: letting a sharp, inventive mind loose in short bursts. Unknown P, the posh drill rapper. Jonny Oliver, the chef. Characters that landed, spread, and made him a fixture of the platform at a moment when that still meant something. He was there, as he puts it, when the sun was coming up on social media—when an idea could be tried, tested, and get genuine feedback from the whole internet without drowning in ten million other uploads.

Now, at 33, he is stepping away from that world. Not entirely, not bitterly, but deliberately. His stage acting debut is in a modern production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, opening September 18 at Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex. He will play Bottom, reimagined as a member of the Young Conservatives in a 1990s rave-scene setting. The production itself is a kind of time machine—a look back at the UK's illegal rave culture, an era of dancing and abandon that happened mostly before everyone carried a camera in their pocket.

Chawawa has spent weeks immersed in footage of those free parties, watching people move through empty fields with no record, no documentation, no digital trace. What strikes him most is the comments underneath: people who were there, saying they miss it. They miss being able to dance, to sweat, to exist in a moment without knowing it would be captured and posted. He admits the irony is not lost on him. He owes his career to the digital age. But he was also there at the beginning, and he watched it change. The average person now picks up their phone 200 times a day. The platforms have turned against creatives, he says—good material gets swiped to the bottom instantly, lost in the noise of tens of millions of videos uploaded daily. It is a different world from the one that made him.

He describes his move to theatre as "jumping ship"—not abandoning social media entirely, but choosing a different kind of challenge, a different kind of connection. Theatre, he says, is the opposite of the screen. It is real human emotion expressed without restraint, metres or centimetres away, in the same room. No algorithm between you and the feeling. He fell in love with theatre at 16 when he saw The Lion King and realized it was like "the best movie you've ever seen, but in real life." But returning as an adult, he felt unwelcome. The shows did not seem to want him there, at least not in the small social cues that add up to a message.

That changed when he saw For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy by Ryan Calais Cameron. He calls it the best play he has ever seen. He had a thought: every black boy in the world should watch this. So he started taking groups. That first outing, he describes as "the most fulfilling and magical and deeply moving experience." It became the Black Boys Theatre Club, a monthly gathering that takes teenagers to plays—Dracula, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and soon, A Midsummer Night's Dream with Chawawa in it—followed by discussion at Nando's. The goal is not to produce the next Billy Elliot. It is to show young people that theatre is a safe space, a home if they want it, a place where they will thrive.

The numbers tell part of the story. In 2023, only 10 percent of theatre audiences were from black, Asian, or ethnically diverse backgrounds, according to Arts Council England. Chawawa praises theatres for opening their doors to his club and similar efforts, but says real change will require lower ticket prices and a broader cultural shift. He believes that shift is coming. As more people step back from screens and digital experiences, he thinks theatre will boom. It is the one place in real life where you can watch somebody express all emotions without restraint—sadness, anger, joy, envy—and feel it in the room with you, not through any screen at all.