Jake Dunn as Blake in Last Days. ©2025 Lola Mansell
Oliver Leith and Matt Copson: Last Days
Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, London December 5, 2025
The blackest black-out imaginable occurs towards the end of composer Oliver Leith and librettist/art director Matt Copson’s Last Days. Is this the oblivion that the desolate figure faltering on stage hitherto so desperately desires? No, it cannot be, because the soundworld that has kept him inescapably in this life is as audible as ever. What skill the instrumentalists of the 12 Ensemble demonstrate, playing on in absolute, total darkness, before a visible coda to this wretched tale.
Based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film, itself based on the demise of Nirvana rock artist Kurt Cobain, Last Days returns to the Linbury Theatre with Jake Dunn as the grunting misery, Blake. In and out of his life flow figures who almost universally have hopes for this desperate falling star, but also want something from him. On the phone, his agent babbles about contracts and arrangements in the bubbling patter of an American cattle auctioneer. At the door, DHL wants to hand in a new guitar, in exchange for a signature. A superfan lurks hopefully. Mormons call to convert him and hang around. A housemate sticks by him. Only a sinister magician encourages his suicidal thoughts.
Outside, a groundsman is closest to the natural world that adds its own insistent voices to the clamour: birdsong and the howling of wolves augment Leith’s pounding score, played largely on percussion and strings, while household background noises force their way to the foreground, breakfast cereal clattering into a bowl like hail on the roof of Blake’s squalid lodge.
Jake Dunn as Blake and Henry Jenkinson as Magician ©2025 Lola Mansell
As Blake rolls and growls like a green honey monster and as more and more characters crowd in on him, he takes comfort in a haunting operatic aria (pre-recorded by Caroline Polachek), its “non ho mai amato così tanto la vita” echoing Cavaradossi’s last aria in Tosca. But Blake does not share the sentiment that he has never loved life so much – he has simply had enough. His personality disintegration is represented by the destruction of his unappealing home. A housemate pees on his foul mattress, breakages equal breakdown.
Like Polacheck, soprano Patricia Auchterlonie soars into the stratosphere, high above Blake’s grungey groans. Bass Sion Goronwy is the Charon-like groundskeeper, solidly alongside, wherever this last journey leads. Jack Sheen and Naomi Woo divvy up the conducting across performances that run into January. On first night, Sheen was master of the complex, combined forces of instrumental and recorded sound and music plus the cacophony generated on stage.
Is there any lightness in this pitch black story? Fortunately, yes. The buoyant percussion, perhaps against expectations, often sounds life-affirming, soothing even, and certainly far from cacophonous. There is something likeable about the beer bottles turned into a makeshift carillon, an object of simple beauty rescued out of excess. Copson’s arty skycloth points to a brighter dawn for those who can muster the determination to look up and out. There are moments of serenity in an otherwise heavyweight score that drills and burrows into the brain.
First staged in 2022, Last Days was co-commissioned with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Leith’s unrelenting music takes a graphic picture of self-destruction – and there are plenty of those across all art forms – to the next level. Whether it is your go-to Christmas show is another matter, but everyone involved has guts aplenty, and if opera houses don’t push the boundaries to the limit, they will self-destruct too.
Last Days is sung in English with English surtitles. Further performances are on 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29 31 December, 2 and 3 January