'Last Days' review — this Kurt Cobain-inspired modern opera is totally mesmerising

Read our review of Last Days, starring Jake Dunn, now in performances at the Royal Opera House to 3 January 2026.

Summary

• Oliver Leith's modern opera returns to the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre
• The show is based on Gus van Sant's film about the suicide of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain
• Jake Dunn is commanding as Cobain surrogate Blake

Contemporary opera has had a banner year during 2025 in London. To the ranks of Festen and Dead Man Walking, we can now add this return engagement of Oliver Leith’s mesmerising Last Days, a co-commission with the Guildhall first seen in 2022.

Back once again at the Linbury where it premiered, this time for a longer run, the opera is derived from Gus van Sant’s 2005 film of the same name, which completed that director’s so-called “death trilogy”. But while the movie imagines what might have led to the suicide in 2004 of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, the 90-minute opera works on its own terms: no knowledge of the grunge scene is required.

Redesigned since it was first seen, this production from co-directors Anna Morrissey and Matt Copson unfolds on a deliberately shabby, split-level set from Grace Smart that moves in and out of darkness, Prema Mehta’s lighting at times irradiated as if to give off an ominous, sulphurous glow.

On view is a woodland hideaway of sorts in which the Cobain surrogate, Blake (Jake Dunn, inheriting a part first taken by a woman, Agathe Rousselle) finds his solitude interrupted by the likes of a DHL delivery person one minute, a pair of chipper Mormons the next. “Nice house,” they squawk, the phone ringing now and again with the latest incomprehensible outpourings of Blake’s manager (voiced by Cole Morrison, whose contribution has been pre-recorded).

Through it all, Blake responds to these intrusions a bit like Scrooge towards his unwanted ghosts, but without the uplift that characterises Dickens's time-honoured narrative. Instead, the emotional trajectory of Last Days is baked into its title: a chronicle of slowly all-consuming ennui with the fatal gunshot, thank heavens, left to the imagination.

The story arc may be preordained, but composer Leith and his librettist, co-director Copson, find infinite variety – wit, even – in what could otherwise be a wallow in despair. Copson’s text ranges from the sweary (“leave him the fuck alone”) to passages worthy of Beckett: “Nothing left on a morrowless day”.

Talk of “the consistency of anarchic waves” may prompt some scratching of the head, but there’s no denying the incantatory power of the sheer repetition of “the end/the end/the end”. The word “misadventure”, too, gets spoken as if on an endless loop from which Blake cannot find respite.

While newbies to operatic alienation may cling to questions like “what is going on?”, others will doubtless thrill to a singular, brass-free score that comes in enveloping surges of sound from conductor Naomi Woo’s strings-intensive Ensemble 12. There’s a nod to grand opera in the Italian interruptions of Caroline Polachek (also pre-recorded), but her embrace of experience – “I’ve never loved life so much” – exists at some remove from the rudderless movement towards oblivion that Last Days anatomises.

The GBSR Duo of George Barton (percussion) and Siwan Rhys (piano) add to a shifting soundscape that allows such quotidian facts of life as doorbells and breakfast cereal – Lucky Charms, surely ironically deployed – into the aural mix. Note, too, the extent to which bells begin to sound like chains, just as strings give off the imminence of sirens.

Through it all, Dunn finds a commanding way into Blake’s quasi-narcoleptic stupor. Indeed, for an opera located in the shadow of death, I’ve rarely this year left a performance feeling so alive.

Last Days is at the Royal Opera House to 3 January 2026. Book Last Days tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Last Days (Photos by Lola Mansell)