If you happened to be drunkenly stumbling home past the Arts Centre in the witching hours of a cool Saturday morning you may note the serenity of the scene. Empty streets, only an Uber or two on the road. You certainly would not guess that just a few floors down a large group of strangers nestled in blanket hoodies are awake witnessing what can only be described as a fever dream.

After their mammoth eight-hour long 2022 RISING production, the team behind 8/8/8: WORK is back again with another durational piece. 8/8/8: REST is the second installment of Marcus McKenzie and Harriet Gillies’ 8/8/8 series which explores the classic division of the 24 hour day: work, play and rest. Taking place from 9pm to 5am, 8/8/8: REST invites its audience into the back rooms of the Arts Centre for, like its predecessor, eight straight hours of experimental performance art—that is, if you can stay awake long enough to actually see it.

It goes without saying that this show is not for the casual theatre goer. The audience is predominantly filled with veterans of the art industry that are the target audience for many of the show’s tongue-in-cheek jokes about RISING festival and the ironic bureaucracy of producing a creative show. Beginning as an immersive conference on the neurology of sleep, the first two hours are filled with humorous keynote speeches and team building exercises that meditate on sleep and its commodification by corporations. The conference is peppered with hilarious bits like the floundering of the “entertainment break” improv performer and the rogue speaker that presents their academic hypothesis by taking drugs on stage. This all ultimately culminates in the conference falling into chaos when the event’s main sponsor is cancelled online over generic allegations. It’s corporate satire that lands well with its audience, and that in all honesty could have been an entire show in itself. But the performance soon takes a hard turn when the audience is ushered downstairs by “sleep debt collectors” for the show’s next portion: sleep rehab.

After being given what could be described as a more versatile Oodie (which you do unfortunately have to return at the show’s end) you’ll find yourself in the Arts Centre’s main underground foyer, a large room that the performers have filled with chairs and couches. It is here that for the next five hours you’ll experience a variety of dream-like performances of spoken word, opera, dance, and meditation, making you question if you really have fallen into a deep slumber.

Or at least, it makes you wish you had. The show quickly loses interest, each mini-performance becoming far too slow and over-extended. There’s the absurdist spoken word that runs longer than a whole week of poetry nights combined; the breathing exercise delivered by a large Amazon box that serves as a nod to the show’s predecessor, but just feels out of place in this supposed sleep space; and of course the opera about emails that feels like an under-rehearsed last minute insert. The show seems to prioritise quantity over quality, and ultimately feels more like an extreme sport than a theatre show: can you stay awake for eight hours simply for the sake of it? By the time you reach the show’s 3am Insomnia Lounge with nothing to do but listen to average house beats for an hour, you’ll be asking yourself why you came at all.

It could be argued that the point of REST is exactly that: to rest. To embrace inaction, to be a little under-stimulated, a little bored even. But staying awake for eight hours with very little to do is a big ask of an audience, and while the performers did not prevent anyone from sleeping (in fact many audience members took the opportunity), if the point of the show is to charge people $88 for a nap then this performance team have created the greatest capitalist scam of the century (ironic for a group that claims to be investigating the commodification of rest.) Realistically, the show needs active entertainment to keep its audience awake. Spaces to freely explore, activities to complete, or if it insists on more passive consumption then at the very least more exciting theatre to watch.

With such an excess of space, time, and presumably budget it felt like 8/8/8: REST simply couldn’t miss. But it has seemingly befallen the fate of so many sequels like it, completely failing to recapture the magic of the original work. Between you and me, you won’t lose any sleep over giving this one a miss.