‘The Last Mad Man’: a Sharp Satire of the Marketing Age (review) *** 1/2

Bitterly funny and riotously bleak, The Last Mad Man is the most apt political satire for the ‘digital marketing internship or die’ age. Writer and performer Steven Phillips-Horst plays the last surviving copywriter, with only an hour to rebrand the apocalypse around him. His Mad Man emerges on stage every bit the traditional Don Draper, complete with moneyed drawl and an ego the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch he helped create.

But Phillips-Horst, who really does work as a freelance marketer when not performing, quickly replaces this caricature with an intriguing, heartfelt character that draws more creatively from Phillips-Horst’s own present-day experiences.

The show’s real protagonist keeps the stereotypical overconfident, boastful façade but now there is clearly a more vulnerable, high-strung persona behind this, one increasingly conflicted not just about his role in accelerating the unsustainable consumerism driving the very apocalypse he suffers from, but also over how he, as a gay man, might fit into the intensely gendered, identity-driven world of marketing.

Much of the show’s satire derives from the competing values of identity and sustainability; asking, for example, whether the goal of feminism really should just be to ensure that the plastic products choking our turtles put money in a businesswoman’s pocket, not a businessman’s.

And while the show’s concept is daringly original, it leans on well-trodden, surface-level social critique slightly too often. These flatter moments don’t erase the show’s sharpest satire, but unfortunately Phillips-Horst’s tamest jokes too frequently receive the most attention: a full subsection of the work is devoted to the generic lampooning of ‘girlboss feminism’, while his breathtakingly hilarious and creative ideas are too regularly confined to throwaway lines.

Still, though, when Phillips-Horst does trust his own creativity and insider marketing knowledge, the result is disturbingly beautiful. He turns sketches of the demographic a product might be sold to into an intimately detailed portrait of the product’s broken promises in an individual customer’s life, and transforms the many buzzwords of marketing into a poetic vocabulary of anguish. ‘The end of the world’ might be ‘a tough sell’, but The Last Mad Man certainly isn’t.

The Last Man Man is Downstairs at Assembly Roxy, 5th till 30th August (except 12th, 17th, 24th).

Photo credit: Hiroki Tan