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I’d never paid attention to the first frame of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video until Matt Copson, the director of Last Days – a new opera based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film loosely charting the final weeks of Kurt Cobain’s life, premiering this weekend at London’s Royal Opera House – pointed it out to me.
It starts with a foot tapping away in a pair of black Converse Chuck Taylors, in what Copson notes (and further research confirms) is likely one of the earliest examples of product placement in a music video, ever. “The irony is that Kurt Cobain is probably the only figure from that era in music that still holds that kind of pop cultural potency,” Copson says. “I mean, who else are you going to walk into a branch of Primark today and see on a T-shirt – but also still genuinely means something?”
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That’s a question that Copson, a 30-year-old visual artist who typically trades in freaky and fantastical projections and laser installations, is attempting to unpick via Last Days. His primary collaborator on the opera, along with co-director Anna Morrissey, is composer Oliver Leith, whose award-winning, atmospheric chamber pieces written for string quartets and woodwind groups made Leith the inaugural composer-in-residence at the Royal Opera House in 2019.
Copson and Leith never set out to write an opera about Kurt Cobain – nor have they actually written an opera about Cobain, it turns out. “Our conversation really started around the tone of it,” says Copson. “We were talking about our mutual interest in mixing extreme banality and the everyday with magic and spectacle, essentially, and we kept returning to this film.” While Van Sant’s Last Days has accrued a cult following for its fascinating, forensic study of loneliness, there was something about Blake, Michael Pitt’s Cobain-proxy character, that felt especially ripe for operatic reimagination, even if entirely divested from the celebrity of Cobain himself. “It kept coming up in conversation as we both felt the film really captured the spirit of what we were interested in,” Copson remembers. “It has such a mystery and an intrigue to it. So eventually we were like, Well, why don’t we just do that?”
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A few emails, a few calls, and a few agent-led back-and-forths later, the rights were theirs, handed over with surprising, total freedom. “Gus was incredibly chill and just said, ‘Go ahead, do whatever you want with it,’” Copson recalls. The next step was to figure out how to translate the narrative structure of Last Days into the medium of opera, but still retain its anarchic streak. They quickly realised that while the film’s meandering plot might initially appear an odd template, its chugging, inevitable descent into disaster has all the trappings of a bombastic, wham-bam-let’s-get-to-the-climactic-aria-ma’am Puccini tragedy.
So Copson, Leith, and their co-director Morrissey decided to go big – first, by inviting Agathe Rousselle, the star of the thrillingly transgressive, Palme d’Or-winning body-horror fiesta Titane, to play Blake. Rousselle said yes, and spends most of the show mumbling and grumbling her way around the apartment in a furry green coat, while a motley crew of characters played by professional opera singers – Mormon missionaries, a groundskeeper, a DHL delivery guy – drift in and out with Beckettian aimlessness, all singing in radically different vocal registers. “I wanted it to feel like a collapsing, crumbling haunted house, with all these ghoulish vocalists kind of disturbing the journey and the fate of this of this person,” says Copson.
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This collapsing of operatic tradition extends to the costumes, too. With Last Days comes both the first time Balenciaga has partnered on costumes for an opera, and the Royal Opera House’s first collaboration with a fashion brand. While Copson had worked with Balenciaga on a prior project, the link-up came about mostly due to the brand’s perfect fit with the show’s mish-mash of supporting characters. (Is there any other major label, after all, that could realistically outfit Mormons, mall goths, and metalheads in one fell swoop?) “One question I kept thinking about, even if it sounds simple, is what does it really mean to make an opera today? What is the point of it?” Copson says. “And I think part of it was about this sense of maximalism, so costume quickly became a really, really important part of that wider visual world.”
Working with the stylist Patrick Welde, Copson dug deep into Balenciaga’s back catalogues to outfit each character, but often found the perfect look was closer at hand than they expected. “We scoured through the archives, but interestingly enough, the best things usually came from the most recent collections,” Copson says. “It ended up working really well, as I didn’t want it to be costume – I wanted it to be something that implicated the present also.” Still, Welde’s initial mood board was more anthropological, with not a single fashion piece in the mix; instead, it came with close-ups of traditional Mormon braided hair and the ripped and DIY-studded denim of Seattle grunge acolytes of the ’90s. “It’s funny because when Matt contacted me, I had just made a folder about an apocalyptic sect,” Welde says. “When I work on a project, I don’t usually pick up fashion images – I prefer to lose myself in all the possibilities, and be more documentary.”
For Blake, in lieu of the knits and accessories that defined Cobain’s ’90s style – the sunglasses, the red-and-black mohair cardigans, the Breton tops and leopard prints – Copson and Welde decided to go a little weirder. Yes, Blake is decked out in Cobain’s classic white clout goggles, but also a pink logoed baseball cap, a hooded micro-check shirt, and most strikingly of all, a Grinch-fabulous acid green mohair coat. “There’s a nice irony that while everyone else exists in these darker tones of blacks, greys, and whites, the one person who wants to hide away is the most visible on stage, always,” says Copson.
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The one thing I can’t stop wondering about, though, is what the seamstresses and costumiers that have worked at the Royal Opera House for decades must have thought when Demna’s floor-length padded parkas, grey sweatpants, and shredded denim were getting adjusted and tended to like the crystal-studded bodices of a prima ballerina. “That building is full of absurdly talented people,” says Copson. “They’re all absolute masters at what they do. And while I didn’t go into there with an agenda to blow it to smithereens, I just wanted to engage with the contemporary. I think there was suspicion at the beginning, but it kind of gave way to excitement from all parties very quickly.” As Welde puts it: “They are all magicians!”
Well, at least that’s settled. But one question remains: Does Cobain, or Blake, still represent something meaningful in popular culture today – tortured genius, doomed rock star, style icon – or is he just a slogan on a shirt, or the headline-grabbing hook for a new opera? Are his achievements burnished or compromised by asking this question? Is there any way of romanticising him without commodifying him at the same time?
“There’s a real tragedy to this icon caught between being a symbol to people, and also being a real person just wandering around a house being like, ‘I can’t fucking do this anymore,’” says Copson. “But then pop culture just digests itself, regurgitates itself, eats it up, reforms itself… and then it eats itself back up again…”
