Jake Dunn on Last Days, the opera everyone is talking about: ‘Bring on the weird’

In the show he wears sunglasses for the duration (“Blake is hiding himself and there’s something quite anti-theatre about that, where it’s all about don’t show yourself, make yourself as small as possible”) and mostly a huge green Balenciaga coat – “I look like the Grinch, but in a really cool way” – yet he radiates a special quality and speaking to him, it’s obvious he possesses an intelligence and intuition which is going to take him far. From Nottingham, his mum a nurse, he says he has always been very shy and anxious, and acting was simply a way to come out of his shell not any big plan of his. he knows nothing about opera, has never seen one, and “not growing up in London, or in a certain bracket or people, I always felt opera was high art, out of my range and orbit.”