ajhlovestheatre

THE LAST MAN

Book and lyrics by Jishik Kim

Music by Seungyeon Kwon 

dramaturg: Jethro Compton

directed by Daljung Kim

Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London – until 13 June 2026

running time: 2 hours including interval

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/the-last-man/

Maybe something got lost in translation but it’s really not easy to see quite why anybody thought a London run for this one-person Korean musical, a massive hit in Seoul, was a good idea. Perhaps encouraged by the phenomenal Broadway success of Maybe Happy Ending, another tuner from the land of K-Pop and superb skincare, Jishik Kim (book and lyrics), Seungyeon Kwon (composer) and director Daljung Kim have brought their tortuous tale of a loner holed up in a Seoul bunker while a zombie apocalypse rages overhead, to Southwark Playhouse, a venue with a commendable track record in discovering new musicals. You can’t win ’em all though, apparently.

Where last year’s Best Musical Tony award winner found a rich and unexpected humanity and emotional punch in its story of a pair of robots going on a road trip just before they reach obsolescence, and had a shimmeringly lovely score, The Last Man only offers music that sounds like Rent-lite, trite anything-for-a-rhyme lyrics and more head-scratching moments than a case of nits. To be entirely fair, there are several really good tunes in this show, and the rock band augmented by a violin, all perched high up above Shankho Chaudhuri’s bleakly whimsical bunker set, sounds pretty terrific. Unfortunately though, the sound design has the music drowning out the words half the time, and even during the spoken sections it’s not always easy to decipher what’s being said which, in a comparatively small auditorium, is an issue. Jethro Compton, co-creator of my favourite British musical in decades, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which also originated at Southwark, is credited as dramaturg, but has failed to work similar magic here.

The leading, and only, role, named simply ‘The Survivor’ is so demanding that it’s played alternately by two performers, one male (Lex Lee) and one female (Nabi Brown). On press night, Lee gave a decent account of a part that requires him, variously, to ventriloquise a cuddly toy, record himself on a mobile phone, squash imaginary bugs, gag from drinking polluted water, pontificate on what it means to be human…all while belting his face off. He works incredibly hard, but the writing gives him little to really dig into, settling for a set of cliched childhood memories and some fatigued humour where he pretends to be media personalities interacting with each other (the glitchy tech on opening night didn’t help, unfortunately) or the voice of the teddy bear he discovers in a random box. This lack of specificity may be down to the character being open, despite the shows title, to performance by different genders, but it makes it pretty hard to invest. It never feels like that much is at stake -a sense of claustrophobia and/or panic is notably absent- so by the time The Survivor has some sort of isolation-driven breakdown deep into the interminable second act, the overall feeling is less pity and empathy and more hope that we’ll soon be able to get out of the theatre.

Too much of the text is delivered in a colourless monotone and at such a pace that it barely registers, which is less the likeable Lee’s fault than something that the director should have addressed in rehearsals. The barely-there staging has the actor wandering aimlessly all over the set in a way that feels sloppy instead of spontaneous.  Lee’s singing voice has a good range but is mostly serviceable where this score really demands something more bravura. I would imagine Brown’s interpretation of the role is necessarily and inevitably quite different, but I don’t think I’ve got the strength to go back and find out.

Two hours seems ridiculously long for a show where so little happens, and the whole thing would benefit immeasurably by cutting at least half an hour’s material and ditching the interval. Plus, removing the break gives bored audience members less chance to bail out. The ending, when it finally, finally comes, is a massive dramatic cop-out where you may find yourself rolling your eyes when presumably the intention is to have you gasping in surprise. I can entirely understand why the tuneful score has its admirers but the show itself, at least in this iteration, is a queasy, undernourished mixture of would-be horror, potty-mouthed and cute that fails to connect. Still, connoisseurs of so-bad-they’re-almost-good musicals might get a kick out of The Last Man. Ponderous.