No one tells a story like Christopher Brett Bailey. In his live reading of the surreal 2023 novella I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven at Soho Theatre, London, he takes the audience on a freewheeling journey that is vividly and viciously told. One moment he is buying eggs at a gas station, the next he is careening down the highway with the devil, deliberately swerving to increase their body count. While it may not match the motor-mouthed intensity or blinding climax of his 2014 beat-poet monologue, This Is How We Die, this performance is a gripping piece of storytelling.
The show features no music or elaborate set. Brett Bailey sits at a table, reading from his script, slurping, hissing, and whispering into the microphone as he weaves a tale of modern America and a man dancing with the devil. Dressed in a fringed leather jacket with snakeskin boots and his signature freshly electrocuted hair, he recounts with eerie calmness an accidental road trip with his overheated companion in small-town America, "two miles north of hell."
A Has-Been Satan
This Satan is a has-been, a conspiracy nut with a bloated ego and a desire to shag anything that moves—plus some that do not. The masochistic script delights in gross, gruesome, and sometimes surprisingly sweet images. The narrator pauses to grin at the audience over a particularly wicked play on words. As the story accelerates, extreme vice, erotic tension, and dulled indifference are rolled into one.
Later, the narrative meanders a bit off-road, and the show currently runs over by 15 minutes. However, Brett Bailey tightens his grip as the story races to the finish, and the length will surely sharpen throughout the run. More of an adult bedtime story than a theatrical feat, the performance is made memorable by the strangeness of Brett Bailey's voices, the uncanny shift as Alex Fernandes's lighting reddens his skin, and the intensity of his wide-eyed glare as he drives his fiendish fable through to its flaming end.
At Soho Theatre until 2 May.
