I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven
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)....
