When the Royal Opera House announced a new opera inspired by the death of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, it felt a little like your dad getting down with the kids about three decades too late. Hip and cool, our national opera company was heading back to the groove ten years after Anna Nicole.
Never judge an album by its cover. Last Days by composer Oliver Leith and librettist Matt Copson turns out to be a mesmerising, fulfilling creation despite the shackles of an elliptical narrative and a silence at its heart. It experiments with theatrical and musical ideas, never self-indulgently, and stirs the emotions by haunting the mind with suggestion rather than blatancy. It is a triumphantly confident composition.
Cobain’s suicide in 1994 instantly propelled him into the pantheon of rockers gone to the angels. Straight in at Number 1, in fact. Thirteen years later, director Gus Van Sant directed Last Days, a fictionalised biopic of the star’s final hours – one that removed all likely impediments by renaming him Blake. (“It’s just a yarn, folks. Nothing actionable.”) In turn, that film gave Leith and Copson the inspiration and title for this 90-minute waltz around the edges of realism, located by designer Grace Smart not under Cobain’s affluent Seattle roof but in and around Blake’s tumbledown cabin on stilts, in a landscape as grungy and foetid as the crumbling mind of its not-quite-Kurt protagonist.
Copson, who also co-directs in tandem with Anna Morrissey, has borrowed a trick from another musical biopic, I’m Not There, in which Bob Dylan was portrayed by (among others) Cate Blanchett. As Blake, a near-silent yet omnipresent protagonist, he and Leith have cast the French actress Agathe Rousselle, a hot property since her nightmarish movie Titane cleaned up in last year’s awards season. Yet since she spends the run-up to Blake’s demise hidden beneath a blond thatch and behind white sunglasses, her gender and fame are both immaterial. She is believable, and that’s good enough.
It isn’t Rousselle’s fault that the opera’s secondary roles are more interesting. Sion Goronwy lends his gravelly bass to two key roles, Patricia Auchterlonie single-handedly embodies the nightmare of shy Blake’s intrusive fans, and baritone Edmund Danon – revisiting the kind of downmarket character he inhabited so effectively in Turnage’s Greek – plays the rock god’s housemate.
If it all sounds dour and depressing there is humour of a sort, but it’s not the opera’s strongest suit. Soprano Mimi Doulton as a delivery driver earns guffaws when she punctures the incipient tragedy by ringing a doorbell and trilling “DHL!”; however, when her calls go unanswered she is subsumed into the prevailing surrealism and, improbably, sets up camp outside Blake’s door until someone appears to sign for her delivery. Thus a potentially witty interlude outstays its welcome. Seumas Begg and Kate Howden appear as house-calling Mormons – a cheap target, and one that’s already been lampooned sufficiently in musical theatre, you might think. As a couple they start out bright and beautiful but end up cross-dressing and stuffed with booze. Sigh.
Leith’s score, brilliantly rendered by 12 Ensemble and the and GBSR Duo under Jack Sheen, is starkly original. He favours low string washes, chord clusters and stabs of percussion, into which he stirs diegetic sounds from the onstage life (distant wolf howls; the snap, crackle and pop of cereal being poured…). Ingeniously, he then enhances these beyond naturalism and embeds them into his orchestration. Midway through the opera, Blake puts a crackly LP on the record player and Leith’s pastiche soprano aria Non Voglio Mai Vedere Il Sole Tramontare fills the theatre. It is pure Twin Peaks: a lush, gorgeous, hallucinatory representation of a heroin high, beautifully sung by a pre-recorded Caroline Polachek. Like the addicted Blake, who cured his munchies by devouring Lucky Charms cereal, I went straight to Spotify and listened again.
