The Makropulos Affair review

There’s a conundrum facing any director dealing with Janáček’s 1926 operatic mystery thriller: how much to focus on its apparently crucial legal bickerings, and how much to reveal about its real themes of time, life and death. It’s a tightrope that director Olivia Fuchs – and soprano Orla Boylan in the central role of Emilia Marty – navigates very persuasively in her striking, at times very moving, production for Scottish Opera. The staging was first unveiled in 2022 at Welsh National Opera, sung in the original Czech. However, here it gains enormously in immediacy and resonance with its English-language performance, in an idiomatic and, at times, bluntly colloquial translation by David Pountney.

Opera diva Marty seems to know far more than she should about a century-long legal dispute and Janáček drops clues as to what’s really going on like breadcrumbs through his first two acts only to reveal the reasons for Marty’s uncanny knowledge in the transcendental denouement.

Gratifyingly, Fuchs never over-signposts where Janáček’s breadcrumbs are leading. But her clues come most captivatingly through her restless, dynamic vision of Marty – sung and acted with arresting variety and insight by Boylan – who is an innocent bystander, harridan, seductress and (somewhat bizarrely) vampire before abandoning pretence to disclose her vulnerability. It’s a magisterial, very human performance, haughty and regal as Marty comes off stage to a dressing room strewn with blood-red roses, but finds a sense of wonder and self-knowledge as she embraces mortality. Boylan’s voice has both power and subtlety, and she conveys a lot of humour, too, in Marty’s haughty disregard for the well-being of others and in the disappointing mundaneness of procreation.

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