No one tells a story quite like Christopher Brett Bailey. One moment he is purchasing eggs at a petrol station; the next, he is hurtling down the highway alongside the devil, deliberately swerving the car to increase their body count. While it does not quite match the motor-mouthed intensity or blinding climax of his 2014 beat-poet monologue This Is How We Die, this live reading of his surreal 2023 novella is a freewheeling piece of storytelling, vividly and viciously delivered.
There is no music nor much in the way of set design. Brett Bailey simply 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 literally dancing with the devil. Dressed in a fringed leather jacket, snakeskin boots, and his signature freshly electrocuted hair, he recounts with eerie calmness an accidental road trip with his overheated companion through small-town America, described as being "two miles north of hell."
This Satan, however, is a has-been: a conspiracy nut with a bloated ego and a desire to copulate with anything that moves—and some things that do not. The masochistic script delights in gross, gruesome, and occasionally surprisingly sweet imagery, with the narrator pausing 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 little off-road, and the show currently runs over by 15 minutes, but Brett Bailey tightens his grip as the race to the finish approaches; the length will surely sharpen throughout the run. More an adult bedtime story than a particularly theatrical feat, it 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.
