Munya Chawawa trades iteration for fixity moving Tempest to stage

Munya Chawawa is trading TikTok for the Globe Theatre — trading six-second rapid-fire characters for a single, magnified performance of The Tempest.

Everyone involved calls it graduation. But this story has a ghost version from 1981 that complicates the narrative.

Rik Mayall and Alexei Sayle built alternative comedy in London's fringe clubs, where failure was permitted and iteration was the format. When they moved to television in 1981, critics celebrated their evolution into legitimacy — but Mayall's best work stayed in the Soho clubs, circulating on bootleg cassettes, while his recorded broadcasts calcified into fixed shapes.

Chawawa's TikTok practice operates on Mayall's original principle. Iteration before an invisible audience, characters sharpened night after night because the medium allows it. TikTok is a club where scripts fail quietly and often enough to become lethal. Theatre is a single performance, magnified, recorded, fixed. A live audience gives you permission to contradict yourself, to find new angles in the same character across dozens of performances. A recorded broadcast locks you in place forever.

The hierarchy between them is not a fact about art but a decision about which kind of impermanence you can bear. It is whether you want the permanence of being seen completely, or the freedom of being seen partially, again and again, until you are exactly right.