The director channels her frustration at the industry into her version of Leoš Janáček’s 1922 opera
The price of immortality may often be up for debate, but it is never actually an option in The Makropoulos Case. In Leoš Janáček’s 1922 opera, based on Karel Čapek’s play, the famous singer Emilia Marty has lived for several centuries and through many self-reinventions after her father, doctor to Emperor Rudolf II, tested an elixir of youth on her. Now the effect is running out and Emilia, seeking the formula, must choose between life and death.
Like Emilia herself, the director Katie Mitchell has declared herself tired of opera’s misogynistic environment; she says that this one will be her last. In designer Vicki Mortimer’s adroit split-screen stages – foyer, bedroom or dressing room, bathroom – Emilia is beset by men who express their passion for her mostly through aggression. When she decides it’s time to leave, you can’t entirely blame her. Still, could there be a better riposte to a would-be rapist than that you are his great-great-great-great-grandmother?
Mitchell is known for rejigging “canonical” operas from a feminist perspective; for this, Makropoulos should be a gift. At its best, her production has touches of brilliance and some wonderfully naughty humour – as well as lesbian sex and toilets in full view. Act I’s legal exposition would be indigestible had Mitchell not filled it with a conspiracy subplot via snarky text messages between the youngsters Krista and Janek, which is fun, even if there’s too much happening at once.
More problematically, an added murder contradicts the libretto, which involves a later suicide note from the victim. It’s a short opera – 100 minutes with no interval – but so overloaded that it feels longer.
The soprano Ausrine Stundyte is a tour de force as Emilia, bringing immense conviction and warmth to the character’s giant, if fed up, heart and soul. She fills each rounded, blossoming note with a wealth of complex emotion.
Around her, the men’s characterisation is (presumably deliberately) as cardboard as the sustainably-sourced set; their singing, however, is superb. The bright, forceful tenor Sean Pannikar as Albert Gregor is outstanding. Alan Oke gives a satirical yet heart-tugging cameo as Count Hauk-Šendorf, Emilia’s lover in, as it were, a former life; the sparring lawyers have luxury casting in Johan Reuter, Henry Waddington and Peter Hoare. As Krista, Emilia’s young female lover, Heather Engebretson, is present almost throughout and admirably holds the stage.
For the Royal Opera’s new music director, the Czech conductor Jakub Hruša, Janáček is a veritable soulmate. His interpretation, already energetic and colourful, should become magnificent, though on opening night its bustling orchestral textures sometimes still needed to settle.
The Makropoulos Case assuredly deserves, if not exactly immortality, then certainly another swig of the formula.
To 21 November
