Dawn Images

With No Time to Sleep, the 24 hour digitally live performance coming soon, Sarmad Khoosat gets candid about playing the character and the importance of such a performance.

Sarmad will be playing Zulfiqar, a prisoner on death row. The performance will capture the last 24 hours of such a person, the complete 24 hours. Going on Dawn's Facebook live, Khoosat and his team for No Time to Sleep talked about creating the drama and the idea behind digitally going live for the performance.

"As an actor I want to immerse in it as much as I can. It is not easy getting into the skin of a person on death row. The irreversible finality is a big challenge," said Sarmad in the video.

About No Time to Sleep being a digitally live performance, Khoosat believes it will, "stand out from everything we're used to seeing because of the truthful and honest portrayal."

"In the time of social media, we're always online, anticipating a notification. We even scroll our timeline when there's nothing else to do. For 24 hours, people will be looking up our performance. They won't be watching it in a go but I imagine they'll be coming back to it every now and then."

He added, "Everyone can go live of Facebook, but to go on it live and perform, bring theatre close to digital like this, I don't think it has really been done. I'll have to embrace the camera and connect with it the way I would with an audience. It's much tougher with cameras, especially with such a long performance."

According to Khoosat, "Working on this required a lot of groundwork. Doing all the research like reading prison manuals and what not. In the process, coming to this point, I have to say I've become very sensitised to the matter. Its not a preconceived notion that we hear about everyday."

Director of No Time to Sleep Ryan van Winkle revealed that the performance was initially planned as a 72 hour performance, "But we decided to start out with 24 hours, we wanted to go easy on Sarmad," he joked.

But even a 24 hour performance is a huge challenge. Does the team behind the project believe it is worth the work?

"We do have people interested in good art and I hope they'll be intrigued by what they see," said Khoosat.

About the project Khoosat revealed, "I did realise that people need to research everything to form their own opinion. Even in matters like religion, rarely do people research and form their own opinions. They stick to someone's interpretation, not even question how that interpretation was concluded. It's important to have your own take on it."