Last Days review – Leith’s opera imagining the final moments of Kurt Cobain is truly disturbing

Linbury theatre, London
An alter ego of the Nirvana frontman is hounded by a stream of fans, friends, Jehovah’s Witnesses, deliveries and even a private investigator

We first see him clambering around, slowly, under the scaffolding that supports his crumbling home (part doll’s house, part squat). He mutters constantly. In one scene he falls suddenly out of a kitchen cupboard. In another, he pulls his lurid green coat closed over his head, childlike in his efforts to disappear.

Blake is the deeply troubled protagonist of Oliver Leith and Matt Copson’s 2022 opera Last Days, based on Gus Van Sant’s film of the same name. With his 90s grunge-icon blond hair and baggy jeans, Blake is unmistakably the alter ego of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain: these imagined last days are his. But it is what we hear in Leith’s operatic version, revived for the first time at the Royal Opera’s Linbury theatre, that transforms this depiction of a person undone into something truly disturbing.

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