We first see him clambering around, slowly, under the scaffolding that supports his crumbling home (part doll’s house, part squat). He mutters constantly. In one scene he falls suddenly out of a kitchen cupboard. In another, he pulls his lurid green coat closed over his head, childlike in his efforts to disappear.
Blake is the deeply troubled protagonist of Oliver Leith and Matt Copson’s 2022 opera Last Days, based on Gus Van Sant’s film of the same name. With his 90s grunge-icon blond hair and baggy jeans, Blake is unmistakably the alter ego of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain: these imagined last days are his. But it is what we hear in Leith’s operatic version, revived for the first time at the Royal Opera’s Linbury theatre, that transforms this depiction of a person undone into something truly disturbing.
Some of the score is purely narrative. Blake – a non-singing role taken here by actor Jake Dunn – is hounded by a stream of fans, friends, Mormons, deliveries (“D”, “H”, “Lllllll”, trilled soprano Mimi Doulton at the door, eliciting one of the evening’s rare laughs) and even a private investigator. Each gets their moment in the musical spotlight, often accompanied by the auto-melancholia of artfully raw sustained strings. The Jehovah’s Witnesses barged their way in with a kind of hymn – this is no Book of Mormon – amid vigorous banjo-style strumming from the strings of 12 Ensemble, conducted by Jack Sheen, who joined in lustily with the singing.
Elsewhere, passages of spare, olde worlde polyphony seem to emanate as a distant musical memory. Leith even orchestrates the household of interlopers gradually falling asleep, conjuring a chorus of snores, whistles and groans that accompanies Blake as he stalks around with a shotgun. The singing was largely excellent – Patricia Auchterlonie’s crystalline superfan a highlight – and the movement in Copson and Anna Morrissey’s production slick.
The most chilling scenes are those that foreground Leith’s remarkable way with timbre, blurring the boundaries of what we hear. When the slow, gentle bending of pitches in the strings suddenly coalesce into the sound of a distant siren. When the clanking of empty bottles turns out to be a tuned melodic riff echoed by voices and instruments, rubbish made musical. When delicate, stratospheric slides in the strings merge seamlessly into the sound of fireworks as light plays across the Disney-ish forest backdrop (by Matt Copson).
When the phone rings and Blake answers, the voice at the other end beatboxes so frantically that words are incomprehensible. Only the surtitles track the caller’s business proposition, its mundanity duetting with the virtuoso nonsense that we and Blake hear. Blake, we understand, is not OK – but in this piece our own grip on reality is also repeatedly and powerfully challenged.
• Last Days is at Linbury theatre, London, until 3 January
