When actor Jake Dunn makes his West End debut this month, it will be in Last Days, an opera in which he not only doesn’t sing, but: “I’m on stage for 90 minutes, and I don’t speak”.
Composer Oliver Leith and librettist and co-director Matt Copson's opera sold out its original run at the Royal Opera House in 2022. It’s based on the 2005 Gus Van Sant film about the final hours of Blake, a rock musician fresh out of rehab, who is clearly inspired by Kurt Cobain, the grunge pioneer and Nirvana frontman who died by suicide in 1994.
Van Sant’s hypnotic film charts Blake’s final days, as he drifts around his woodland cabin, eating cereal, rarely speaking. It’s an unlikely basis for an opera but Leith and Copson found a way to translate it for the stage, capturing the slow unravelling of an artist haunted by inner turmoil. The show features an original aria featuring alt pop singer Caroline Polachek, and a score that blends operatic singing with a soundscape of rustling bin bags, glass bottles and the pouring of cereal.
While in the original production Blake was played by French actor Agathe Rousselle (Titane) this time Dunn dons the iconic sunglasses. This is something of a departure for the young actor, who has put in memorable performances in Sally Wainwright’s 2024 historical adventure series Renegade Nell and the BBC’s recently released What It Feels Like For A Girl, based on the memoir by Paris Lees. (“I'm really proud to be part of that show,” he tells Broadsheet).
While he’s done theatre before, this will be his first opera. “It’s quite exciting and provocative, because it's asking you to invest in a protagonist who doesn't have an instrument,” he says. Being the silent centre of an opera can feel quite surreal. “It feels like you’re in a Salvador Dali painting. You’re in a scene with someone, and they’re singing at you, and it feels like everyone’s melting.”
Born in Nottingham in 2000, Dunn didn’t grow up listening to Nirvana. In fact, he didn’t know much about Cobain at all when he auditioned. “I didn't have any preconceptions. I knew next to nothing.” This has ultimately proved useful, because the opera isn’t a biography – it’s inspired by Cobain but not about him, and it’s not out to provide answers around his death. “It's talking about something bigger, about our parasocial interest in people we don't know and the mythology around that.”
For the purposes of his performance, “I think it was useful for me to not know”. Though he has subsequently started listening to Nirvana. “There's no part of that which feels like revision,” he laughs.
It’s relatively rare for actors to move between forms in this way, from theatre to TV and opera, but Dunn clearly relishes the challenge, especially as opera is not a genre with which he had much experience. “I had no exposure to opera. I’ve never seen an opera. It did feel like something that wasn’t meant for me,” he says, recognising that, given its subject matter, Last Days, may also appeal to people who feel that opera isn’t for them. “That’s really exciting, because you’re bringing someone into that world.”
Last Days runs from December 5 to January 3 at the Royal Opera House.
