During the interval of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the Young Vic, a student from Elms Academy in Lambeth, south London passes his phone down the row of seats to show his fellow pupils something. It’s a video of Unknown P, a middle-class drill rapper who wears a flat cap and spits boastful lyrics about the opera, yachts and eating olives in Venice. It’s one of the many alter egos of the actor and satirical comedian Munya Chawawa, who is sitting in a row behind the students. Chawawa had already introduced himself to the group of boys a few hours earlier – and they’d excitedly asked their teachers of his whereabouts before he arrived at the theatre – but it’s as though it’s just dawned on them that they’ve been taken to a play by the same guy they see all over TikTok.

“I love the staging,” Chawawa tells me as he hands out small tubs of ice-cream to the boys while we wait for the second act of Rajiv Joseph’s Iraq war drama to start. “I love the exploded rubble. How they went between an army base camp to an asylum room, to a zoo, to a military zone. I’m interested to learn more about why the tiger has a Scottish accent.” When Chawawa isn’t releasing viral rap skits, appearing on TV shows such as The Great British Bake Off, or posting witty political sketches to his millions of social media followers, he can be found at the theatre. He goes to several shows a month. “Theatre makes me so happy. It’s like being able to step inside a dream where anything can happen.” Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is set after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and features the ghost of a tiger wandering Baghdad and haunting the US marine who shot it. “I felt bad for [the marine],” Joshua, 16, tells me. “That’s what I like about acting. It makes people feel emotions.”