How do you review a show that begins with the end of the world?
The Last Mad Man is one of those rare Fringe productions that manages to be uproariously funny while quietly lodging itself somewhere in the back of your mind. I found myself laughing out loud in places that probably weren’t appropriate, only to be caught moments later reflecting on questions that were entirely appropriate.
Steven Phillips Horst plays Steven, an advertising executive who survives civilisation’s collapse and instinctively does the only thing he knows how: he starts trying to brand the apocalypse. It’s a gloriously absurd premise, but one that quickly evolves into something far richer. Layer upon layer, the story builds into what Horst aptly describes as an “ecological noir-cum-capitalist fever dream”. After all, if your story starts with the end of the world, where else can it go except deeper into ourselves?
Horst draws on his own experience of the advertising world to create a character who is both hilarious and painfully recognisable. The satire lands with precision, asking whether marketing has become so pervasive that we’ve lost sight of what really matters. Yet this is never a lecture. The jokes arrive thick and fast, and just when you think you’re watching a brilliantly observed comedy, the emotional weight quietly catches up with you.
There’s an intimacy to Horst’s performance that makes Steven’s increasingly fractured world feel less like science fiction and more like a metaphor for the personal catastrophes we all navigate. The apocalypse becomes less an event than a state of mind.
The Last Mad Man is smart, inventive and disarmingly funny. You’ll laugh, you’ll wince, and somewhere between the punchlines and the existential dread, you may find yourself wondering what we’d all choose to save if the world really did end tomorrow. The balloon goes up, at were, Downstairs at Assembly Roxy on Roxburgh Place, until 30 August (not 17 and 24).
