It’s advice the team behind the opera clearly took to heart: certainly, no one is going to claim Last Days as a wilful lunge for lowest common-denominator mainstream appeal. But it was lovely, because he also just said, ‘Do your own thing.’” “It’s like four red words: sofa, insurance document, something else. “He sent back a Word document that was one page,” says Copson. When the opera’s authors, composer Oliver Leith and librettist, art director and co-director Matt Copson contacted Gus Van Sant to ask his permission for the adaptation, they also asked if he could forward them a copy of the film’s script. It has no real linear plot (“having a literal ‘I know what happened to Kurt Cobain in his last days’, we’re not going to do that,” says co-director Anna Morrissey) and what dialogue there is is both improvised and pretty desultory. On the other, if you were looking for a film to adapt as a theatrical production, Last Days seems a deeply unlikely choice. ‘He held so many contradictions within himself’… Cobain in 1994. This is a rehearsal for Last Days, the Royal Opera House production based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film about a disaffected rock star called Blake: it was fairly obviously a grim fantasy based on the “missing” five days between Cobain absconding from a rehab facility in Los Angeles and killing himself in an outbuilding of his Seattle home, a period during which his wife, Courtney Love was reduced to hiring a private detective to try to find out where he was. This is not a development that goes down well with the figure that looks like Cobain, who hides in a kitchen cupboard. A man enters stage right, noisily dragging a leaf rake behind him, and starts singing in a powerful bass voice. From a distance, the figure vaguely resembles Kurt Cobain – ragged clothes, dyed dirty-blond hair – a resemblance that increases when they climb a staircase into the stage’s representation of a battered-looking apartment, and put on what looks remarkably like a pair of the white-framed women’s sunglasses so associated with the late Nirvana frontman they’re now colloquially known as “Kurt shades”.
Through the gloom, a figure emerges, muttering incomprehensibly.
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