Oliver Leith and Matt Copson's opera after Gus Van Sant's film about a musician modelled on Kurt Cobain returned to the Linbury Theatre with Jake Dunn as Blake.
Oliver Leith’s opera Last Days is based on Gus Van Sant’s film about a musician modelled on Kurt Cobain. It returned to the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from Friday 5 December 2025 to Saturday 3 January 2026.
The libretto, by Matt Copson, adapts Van Sant’s 2005 film, a fictionalised account of Cobain, who died in 1994. The film belongs to Van Sant’s Death Trilogy with Gerry and Elephant, a Palme d’Or winner, and puts mood ahead of plot.
In the opera, Blake, a musician, slips out of rehab and back to his house. A delivery worker, two Mormons, a chorus of scrounging friends and a private investigator drift through his rooms.
Leith took repetition from Nirvana and left the sound alone. He built his score from whistles, rustling bin bags, glass bottles and poured cereal.
The run followed the work’s first staging at the Linbury in 2022. It was a co-commission with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Copson and Anna Morrissey co-directed. Jake Dunn, known from the television series Renegade Nell, sang Blake, with Patricia Auchterlonie as the Superfan and Sion Goronwy as the Groundskeeper. Caroline Polachek contributed a recorded aria.