If you know Christopher Brett Bailey you will surely know him for 2014’s This Is How We Die, a hallucinatory, hilarious beat poetry-style road trip monologue that ended in an awesome roar of sound as the show – hitherto just Bailey at a desk – morphed into a cacophonous post rock gig.
There have been other lower-key projects since, plus at least one major dead end in the form of Carnival: At the End of Days, a film the Canada-born, US-raised, London-resident Bailey co-wrote with Terry Gilliam (it has suffered the fate of many Terry Gilliam films and seems unlikely to ever in fact be made).
But it’s probably reasonable to call I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven Bailey’s first major live show since This Is How We Die (which toured for years).
Viewed through a strict theatre lens, there hasn’t been a huge amount of progression since TIHWD: it’s Bailey sitting at a desk again, delivering a hallucinatory road trip monologue again, only without the rock gig bit this time (select performances including the press night do include a batshit coda: it would be unfair to spoil the surprise and weird to discuss it as part of the show when it usually isn’t).
But that’s not a particularly fair way of looking at it, I don’t think. With his mad-scientist hair and mad-scientist stare and general mad-scientist vibes all round, Bailey is a compelling live presence. He is, however, a guy sitting at a desk reading from typed pages (we know they’re not just a prop because he points out some typos). There’s some niftily atmospheric lighting from Alex Fernandes. But beyond that there isn’t really a wider creative team: it’s a great, weird poetry recital in a signature style. And the monologue is actually adapted from Bailey’s 2023 novella of the same name: the show is perhaps best viewed as an artful live reading, a sort of crazed neo-beatnik equivalent of Charles Dickens’ celebrated recitals.
The story is set in a boring small town in the US, where the narrator does indeed see Satan at a popular convenience store chain, buying soy milk. Clocking Bailey’s narrator, the glowering fallen angel points out the milk is for allergy rather than ethical reasons, and demands Bailey get in his car, whereupon they leave a trail of carnage across the uncaring neighbourhood before heading to a bar to try and resolve the sexual tension between the two of them.
It’s a luridly gonzo piece of storytelling that revels in absurdist twists, moments of pure WTF and generally over-exposing us to Bailey’s abundantly active imagination. It is also continually subversive of masculine stereotypes, be that growling alpha males or the hoarier hard-rock variant, something further underscored by the eccentric bonus ending scene.
It’s a cool weird guy doing a cool weird (but very entertaining) monologue. If he came out with one of these every year then maybe there would be no need for a review each time, but a decade plus on from This Is How We Die I’m happy to point out that Christopher Brett Bailey still has ‘it’.
