Review: LAST DAYS, Royal Ballet And Opera

We still don’t know what Kurt Cobain did in the days before his suicide in 1994. Gus Van Sant offered one hallucinatory guess in Last Days, refashioned into opera by Oliver Leith and Matt Copson, and now revived at the Royal Ballet And Opera.

Not much actually happens in Leith’s much-lauded adaptation. What it lacks in narrative propulsion, it compensates for with atmosphere: a slow, grey suffocation that hangs over the stage like an approaching storm. The work drifts, broods and mutters to itself as a tragic coda to a Cobain’s life spinning out of control.

Blake, Cobain’s stand-in, languishes in an isolated cabin. The forest around him growls and groans. Stagnation seeps through the score. Syrupy strings sliding into hungover atonality, as if the music itself can barely lift its head after a night of heavy hedonism.

Visitors drift in and out of Blake’s purgatory. A superfan tracks him down. Two Mormons arrive, only to be briskly reimagined as roadies. A DHL driver materialises like an emissary from the real world. Sirens wail from Blake’s distant past, funereal phone calls from his manager echo uncannily.

The whole thing swamps itself in a soup of melancholic contradiction, maybe best exemplified when Blake plucks the strings of a jangly guitar summoning the spirit of grunge. Then, suddenly, a shaft of light: an aria recorded by singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek slices through the gloom, offering a fleeting glimpse of Blake’s longing for redemption. But even this moment of soprano sweetness is quickly swallowed by the surrounding darkness, a brief shimmer before the storm closes in again.

Grace Smart’s set deepens the opera’s dreamlike delirium. Characters materialise out of nowhere. Colours pulse and throb across an elemental backdrop. Co-directors Anna Morrissey and Matt Copson steer the production with a playful fatalism, leaning into the slippery lack of logic of Blake’s unravelled world, and sucking us in further.

One wonders what Cobain would make of today’s hyper-polished ecosystem of influencers and industry plants. It’s hard to picture the man who spent so much energy railing against the machinery that ultimately enshrined him cheerfully filming a Tiktok. Last Days could be a trite warning against the crushing power of fame, but instead it defies easy interpretation. That makes it all the more deliciously tantalising.

Last Days plays the Royal Ballet And Opera until 3 January 2026