No one tells a story like Christopher Brett Bailey. One minute he’s buying eggs at a gas station and the next he’s careening down the highway with the devil, the car deliberately swerving to increase their body count. Though it doesn’t 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 free-wheeling piece of storytelling, vividly and viciously told.
There’s no music nor much set. It’s just Brett Bailey reading from his script at a table, slurping and hissing and whispering into the microphone as he weaves a story of modern America and a man literally dancing with the devil. In a fringed leather jacket with snakeskin boots and his signature freshly electrocuted hair, Brett Bailey recounts with eerie calmness an accidental road trip with his overheated companion in small town America, “two miles north of hell”.
But this Satan is a has-been, a conspiracy nut with a bloated ego and a desire to shag anything that moves – plus some that don’t. The masochistic script delights in gross, gruesome and sometimes surprisingly sweet images, with our narrator pausing to grin at us over a particularly wicked play on words.
As the story accelerates, extreme vice, erotic tension and dulled indifference are rolled into one. Later, the story meanders a little off-road and the show currently runs over by 15 minutes, but Brett Bailey tightens his grip as we race to the finish and the length will surely sharpen throughout the run. More of an adult bedtime story than a particularly theatrical feat, it’s made so 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
