Inside the eight-hour Melbourne play where the creators don’t mind if you nod off (sort of)

A moment in 8/8/8 Work, the eight-hour play performed at the 2022 Rising festival in Melbourne. The second in the triptych, 8/8/8 Rest, is about to begin. Photograph: Eugene Hyland

Deep into the eight-hour-long theatre production 8/8/8: Work, dutiful audience members began shaving the naked body of Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder had stepped on to a mini Segway to glide around the room, stark naked but for a cowboy hat and a single wireless earbud, delivering a speech that Star Trek’s William Shatner once gave after disembarking from a Bezos-owned Blue Origin space rocket.

“Amazon was in the news. Workers not having time in their lunch break to get far enough across the warehouse to go to the bathroom. A lot of pissing in bottles,” says Marcus McKenzie, who created 8/8/8: Work with Harriet Gillies and played Bezos that afternoon in 2022, a performance staged at the Rising festival in Melbourne. “There was just so much Amazon lore, late capitalist satire ripe for the picking.”