The final days of Kurt Cobain's life will be transformed into a dramatic opera by London's Royal Opera.
The show is inspired by director Gus Van Sant's 2005 film "Last Days," which follows Blake, a rock star, in the days leading up to his death from apparent suicide. The character is loosely based on Nirvana’s frontman Cobain, according to Guitar World, who died by suicide at age 27 in 1994.
The plot sees Blake return from rehab only to be "haunted by objects, visitors, and memories distracting him from his true purpose — self-destruction," the Royal Opera said in a statement, according to Guitar World.
The opera, also entitled "Last Days," is composed by Oliver Leith, who describes himself as a "massive" Nirvana fan. Commenting on the band, Leith said that Nirvana's music "soundtracked" his teen years and was among the first songs he learned to play on the guitar.
"I owe a lot of how I now make music to the sound of grunge from that time — I had never really thought about where my experimental mess and repetitions had come from," he said.
Cobain, he added, is "an archetypal story," and "operas deal well in those."
"Last Days" is directed by Matt Copson and Anna Morrissey and will be staged this October at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre.
In the world of film, Cobain's dark nature was what inspired the new "Batman" movie. Director and co-writer Matt Reeves explained to Empire magazine that van Sant's "Last Days" formed the foundation upon which he developed the character Bruce Wayne.
"When I write, I listen to music, and as I was writing the first act, I put on Nirvana’s 'Something In The Way,'" Reeves said. Nirvana fans will recognize a reimagined version of "Something in the Way" playing in the trailer. It was this song that formed the basis of Reeves' creation.
"That’s when it came to me that, rather than make Bruce Wayne the playboy version we’ve seen before, there’s another version who had gone through a great tragedy and become a recluse," he said. "So I started making this connection to Gus Van Sant’s 'Last Days,' and the idea of this fictionalized version of Kurt Cobain being in this kind of decaying manor."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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