Pune: In a world where sleepless nights have become a badge of productivity, theatre practitioner Aditi Venkateshwaran is bringing an unlikely protagonist to the stage to remind audiences of the value of rest.In ‘Dearest I Beg of You Please Sleep Properly’, to be staged by the International Association for Performing Arts and Research (IAPAR) at Shreeram Lagoo Rang Avkash (SLR) on Aug 8, Venkateshwaran writes, directs and performs a solo work centred on Nidra, the forgotten Hindu goddess of slumber, whose greatest struggle is that humanity has stopped listening to her.The play emerged from Venkateshwaran’s final-year independent project at the Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore. While searching for a subject, she found herself repeatedly returning to a reality that felt both deeply personal and widely shared — urban fatigue.“I kept coming back to images of traffic, pollution, relentless construction and overburdened cities. Whether it was Chennai, Puducherry, Mumbai or Pune, I saw the same civic struggles translating into another crisis that is people are unable to sleep or rest,” she said.The play takes its title from a line inspired by a sentence in a letter Franz Kafka wrote to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in Dec 1912, urging her to make time for sleep and walks, whatever the cost. More than a century later, the advice resonates in an age of relentless productivity and constant connectivity. The irony that Kafka himself suffered from chronic insomnia makes his plea for rest all the more poignant.Venkateshwaran, rather than approaching the subject through sleep studies or statistics, turned to mythology, folklore and lullabies from different Indian languages. During her research, she discovered references to Nidra Devi, a deity who has largely faded from public consciousness.“We all know the deities associated with wealth, wisdom or power, but I realised we had forgotten that we also have a goddess of sleep. There are prayers, songs and scriptures dedicated to Nidra, yet we hardly remember her today. I felt it was about time we invoked her,” she said.On stage, Venkateshwaran portrays six characters, with Nidra at the centre. The goddess blesses the world through lullabies, only to discover that modern life has abandoned sleep. The play unfolds as Nidra’s nightmare, blurring the line between dream and reality as audiences are prompted to ask whether the real nightmare is the sleepless world they inhabit.The other characters represent ordinary city dwellers juggling work, family and daily pressures, each finding reasons to postpone rest. A mosquito also appears as a recurring figure, becoming both a familiar interruption to sleep and a metaphor for the emotional numbness that accompanies life in overcrowded cities.“When I’m on the streets, I see people constantly anxious, angry and rushing somewhere without knowing where they’re going. We have become accustomed to tragedy and exhaustion. I wanted Nidra to start a conversation about that,” she said.The play has already struck a chord with audiences in Singapore and Mumbai.“Many were surprised to discover that Nidra is an actual goddess from Indian mythology rather than a fragment of my imagination. Others told me they went home determined to sleep on time, and some even messaged me days later saying the lullabies sung on stage were still with them, making them feel like slowing down,” Venkateshwaran said.
