'The Makropulos Case' review — Katie Mitchell brings multimedia and feminist revisionism to this bold expressionist opera

Read our review of Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Case, now in performances at the Royal Opera House to 21 November.

Summary

• The Royal Opera stages Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s 1926 expressionist work for the very first time
• The story centres on a famous singer who is seemingly immortal
• Ausrine Stundyte is assertive and unsentimental as singer Emilia Marty
• Katie Mitchell's eye-catching production features her signature use of multimedia

Katie Mitchell’s production of Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s 1926 The Makropulos Case marks the Royal Opera’s first-ever production of this expressionist show, and it is also what Mitchell has announced will be her final foray into opera. As the curtain call reception indicated, like much of Mitchell’s output, it is likely to be a divisive interpretation, and it features her signature use of multimedia and feminist revisionism that brings the work into the present day.

Set in an impersonal hotel room and bar, the production opens with an exchange of messages on a dating app. Young singer Krista (Heather Engebretson) slides into the DMs of established diva Emilia Marty (Ausrine Stundyte) and goes up her hotel room for an afternoon tryst and to root through Marty’s collection of antiques when the star goes down to the bar to give evidence in a centuries-old inheritance dispute.

Mitchell’s use of multimedia is most effective with the projection of the photo album featuring images of Marty and a parade of babies spanning numerous historical eras, which illustrates Marty’s seeming immortality. She is a woman who lacks attachment to her children and has lost count of how many “bastards” she has produced over the centuries. Changing her identity and nationality every generation while keeping her “EM” initials, she was originally Elina Makropulos, born in 1585 as the daughter of the doctor to Emperor Rudolf II, and used as a human guinea pig to test her father’s elixir of eternal life.

There’s a lot going on with the demands of following the surtitles, the text messages that fill in the characters’ motivations, and the interactions taking place within the triptych of stage locations (designed by Vicki Mortimer). The lesbian relationship has been developed for this production, and it makes sense that as Marty’s relationships with men have been unfulfilling and transactional, she might seek seemingly richer connections with women – although Krista has her own ulterior motives.

Stundyte is an assertive, unsentimental Marty, who is wonderfully preserved at around 40 (not an ingenue and mature enough to have a rounded sense of herself) and, like Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie, is firmly in her prime and uncowed by male attempts to shame her for having left behind letters detailing “exotic sexual practices” (and a Victorian vibrator is among her collection of ephemera – that’s probably not in the original libretto). She shows her softer side in her reunion with the elderly Count Hauk-Sendorf (Alan Oke) who knew her as Eugenia Montez – she might have long forgotten him, but she made an indelible impression on his life.

The supporting characters are an elusive bunch and it isn’t easy to keep a handle on them (not the fault of the cast). However, Peter Hoare is a slippery customer as Krista’s father Vitek and Sean Panikkar embodies male entitlement as inheritance claimant Gregor. Engebretson also demonstrates wily cunning as the scheming Krista, to whom the potion is ultimately passed.

The Royal Opera’s Czech music director Jakub Hrůša conducts with a palpable sense of urgency. As she prepares to depart from the land of the living, Marty notes that being good and being bad indefinitely gets boring. Whether this production will live forever in the Royal Opera’s repertoire is uncertain, but it does deserve to be given a chance to make its presence known.

The Makropulos Case is at the Royal Opera House to 21 November. Book The Makropulos Case tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Makropulos Case (Photos by Camilla Greenwell)