Edinburgh Fringe 2026
The Last Mad Man
Steven Phillips-Horst
Genre: Dark Comedy, Solo Show, Theatre
Venue: Assembly Roxy
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Steven is trying to deliver a rebranding of the apocalypse. In under an hour. With a full storyboard including objectives, audience, message and media. Oh, and that trite three or four word strapline that sounds so similar to something else someone’s peddling. But the end of the world is a tough sell for this last Mad Man.
Review
Lights up on a functional office space that’s home to a creative, with its patterned rug, office chair, standard lamp and coffee table with a fashionably retro telephone that no-one under the age of 50 would recognise but anyone north of that number will instantly recall – one where you had to stick your finder in a hole and twiddle to connect to another human being.
Someone’s also gone into overdrive with the dry-ice machine which, with some appropriately timeless music, transports us to some point, somewhere in the future as Steven (aka the real Steven Phillips-Horst) enters, ranting that AI, not even his personal robot Wilson, can replace the pure genius of humanoid copywriters. AI can’t even come up with aggressive spam, for heavens’ sake, so how is it going to get inside the customer’s mind to find the strapline that persuades them to buy something they don’t need and will never use and that ends its days as washed-up detritus on some distant foreign shore.
So, only a real person, The Last Mad Man, could possibly deliver a rebranding of the apocalypse. In under an hour. With a full storyboard including objectives, audience, message and media. Oh, and that trite three or four word strapline that sounds so similar to something else someone’s peddling.
That’s the premise for Phillips-Horst’s sixty minute tsunami of ideas, concepts and words, words and more words as he takes on the ultimate ad man challenge in what proves to be a very sharply written exposé of the more cynical side of the persuasion industry. In a piece of theatre that’s constructed with some precision, Phillips-Horst flips between the puzzle he’s trying to solve – how to make the end of the world seem exciting – and the seminal moments in his alter ego’s precarious freelancing career that have got him to the point where he needs to carve a statue with words to mark the final ending.
Phillips-Horst’s writing is assured, witty and rather too close to what’s actually going on out there for comfort. That’s a mark of this production, it treads the fine line between reality and parody with consummate ease, the heavy line in satire helping us along the way, and Phillips-Horst’s engaging, conversational delivery ensuring a clear connection with his full and attentive audience.
Using that staple of the modern ad man, the Powerpoint presentation, he rattles through his developing storyboard as the time ticks inexorably away. But creator’s block sees him choose branding that turns out to be omni-present in all the wrong places, leading to a frenetic finale in which there appears to be no way out – only for one to emerge from an unlikely source.
This is theatre where you’ll need to have your wits about you to get the best out of it; the rapid twists and turns in the plot; the avalanche of words that will hit you; the nuanced humour; the rapid changes in character as Phillips-Horst deftly plays anyone and everyone that crosses his career and life path. But hang on in there, as this is clearly someone who follows the ad man’s bible to a tee : present a problem offer a solution and make the customer the hero. Which kind of sums the whole thing up. Highly recommended.
