Agathe Rousselle and Sion Goronwy in Last Days at the Royal Opera House
(Picture: Camilla Greenwell)Opera and film have flirted with each other since the earliest days of cinema but the traffic has mostly been from opera house to screen. Based on Gus van Sant’s 2005 film of the same name, Oliver Leith’s Last Days travels in the other direction.
Van Sant admitted that he’d been “inspired” by the last days of Kurt Cobain, godfather of grunge, who committed suicide in 1994. The film, though, ended with a disclaimer: “It is a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed in the film are also fictional”.
Make of that what you will but van Sant’s Last Days is no kind of biopic. Nor is Leith’s opera. Rather, both are fragmentary meditations on one particular lost soul, who could stand in for every lost soul driven to suicide. Not an obvious choice as a subject for opera, which is an excellent reason to turn it into one, especially if, like Leith, you don’t want to write an opera that is standard-issue “operatic”.
Leith and his librettist Matthew Copson follow, not too closely, the trajectory of Van Sant’s film yet they create their own strange, uncomfortable world. Copson and Anna Morrissey’s staging, in Grace Smart’s split-level set, takes us into the dishevelled entropy of Blake’s home, where almost nothing happens but always with an almost hallucinatory intensity.
From the very opening moments Leith’s music has a repetitive, circling quietude, far removed from Cobain’s full-on clamour: this is not a tribute opera. His small orchestra (the strings of 12 Ensemble plus percussion and piano from GBSR Duo, conducted with calm authority by Jack Sheen) creates a hazy penumbra, occasionally enriched by noises from the natural world (sound design by Sound Intermedia), through which the voices, two of them pre-recorded, emerge, by turns lyrical, menacing or darkly comic.
As in the film, the central character is named Blake; he’s played by French actress/model Agathe Rousselle, the gender switch perhaps drawing on scenes in the film in which Blake looks just like a woman. Rousselle doesn’t sing, she mutters and grumbles, mostly unintelligibly. The surtitles, misguidedly perhaps, give us the words, when not understanding Blake’s mumblings is part of the point.
The most “operatic” passages come when Blake plays a record that obsesses him: an utterly convincing imitation Italian aria, composed by Leith and heard in a recording by Caroline Polachek. By contrast, Blake’s manager (voiced by Cole Morrison) is only heard on the phone; intoning in the rapid-fire monotone of a Montana livestock auctioneer (Cole Morrison), he is as incomprehensible as Blake.
The rest of the singers, all live, mostly double-cast, represent a motley bunch: deadbeat hangers-on, a delivery man, two doorstep evangelists who strip off to join Blake’s scuzzy housemates. Everyone is wholly in-role and delivers their often disjointed lines with exemplary clarity and commitment. This is the kind of compelling ensemble performance that new operas need but don’t always get. Last Days is Leith’s first opera; I don’t think it’ll be his last.
