De Insomniis theatre
“For those who don’t sleep because the world still needs dreaming.”

De Insomniis Theatre is a London-based physical theatre company, telling stories from the edge of language, land, and memory. We create bold, sensory performances that explore the intersections of migration, climate collapse, and womanhood, not as isolated crises, but as deeply connected struggles for survival, dignity, and belonging.
From the silence of a grandmother’s kitchen to the rising waters of a fractured homeland, our work is rooted in testimony, ritual, and resistance. We weave movement, sound, and generational memory into visceral theatre, haunting, hopeful, and urgent.
We collaborate across borders, disciplines, and languages to build stages where displaced bodies are not erased but made mythic.
Themes we explore:
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Diaspora and the politics of home
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Intergenerational trauma and inherited silence
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Feminist resistance across cultures
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The climate crisis as both a personal and a planetary loss
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Rituals of survival: food, body, grief, story
We work with:
Immigrant artists, climate justice activists, community storytellers, survivors, and thinkers who dream in more than one tongue.


Past Project
BESA
It is 1943, and the Albanian population, in an extraordinary act, refuse to comply with the German occupation's orders to turn over Jews who have fled there for safety. Moreover, many of these Albanians are Muslim. The assistance afforded to the Jews was grounded in BESA, a code of honour, which still serves as the highest ethical code of the century today.
In this 60-minute play, we join an Albanian family who hosts two Jews fleeing from neighbouring Greece. Witnessing the extent to which BESA influences their choices, the everyday struggles of a family, and the boundless relationship between Albanian Muslims and Jews, we are reminded in this story how politics usurps honour in the 21st century, and migration is not a luxury, but a necessity to survive.
‘A relevant play to put on at the moment’ ★★★★
Robert Lanachan
‘An extraordinary and charming play’ ★★★★
By Richard Beck


UPCOMING PROJECT
Diaspora Inferno: From My Grandmother’s Kitchen

The upcoming play Diaspora Inferno: From My Grandmother’s Kitchen is a multilingual physical theatre piece that reimagines Dante’s Inferno through the lived experiences of immigrant women. Performed in Albanian, Italian, English, and other languages, it blends personal testimony, ritual, and physical movement to explore themes of womanhood, exile, injustice, survival, and resilience. Rooted in kitchen memories, spaces of warmth, loss, and cultural transmission, the piece traces a journey through metaphorical and literal hells shaped by displacement, war, and marginalisation.
The play will be put on at the Drayton Arms Theatre 11th to - 15th of November 2025
Over the summer of 2025, we have been running an R&D workshop to develop the foundations of this piece with a range of extraordinary performers and practitioners