The Makropulos Affair finds its elixir of life to remain immortally relevant
‘How ugly to be old!’
Composed in the 1920s by Czech composer Leoš Janáček, The Makropulos Affair is an opera based on a play by the same name. Consisting of three acts, it’s about a great opera star, Emilia Marty, who’s three centuries old. Over the years, she has lived as, among other names, Elian MacGregor and Elina Makropulos, but it’s in her current guise as Marty that she interrupts a long-running legal case as she hunts for the formula that would give her three centuries more.
In its centenary, The Makropulos Affair finds new life. Having first been produced in Scotland more than forty years ago by the same companies of this production, Scottish Opera and Welsh National Opera, it proves its timelessness with an enduring message about meaning in life.
Set in the 1920s, it opens in a contemporary solicitor’s office. You are taken on a journey, though, through Marty’s increasingly-revealing psychological state by way of a deluge of discarded roses dead centre of Marty’s dressing room to the hospital-white of Marty’s hotel room. Adorning the sets are clocks. One for each act, you progress from a standard clock to an enormous clock, surreal rather than practical, and finally to an ornate clock on the headboard of the bed, a headstone for the climactic conclusion. The story takes place across a short space of time but the set design transports you across eras.
It’s across eras that Marty ends up as she is. She’s rude and selfish, and unapologetic about it; she belittles the men declaring their love for her, and dismisses a suicide she’s blamed for by brushing her hair. Indeed, she incites the passions of everyone around her, a femme fatale through mere presence. She bends their wills to hers, using sex to get what she desires. After all, as Marty proclaims, ‘it’s only fucking.’
Orla Boylan, playing Marty, doesn’t hold back. She pronounces it loudly, shocking the audience into a collective gasp. It can be a difficult role; Marty is a complex character but she’s not necessarily a likeable one for much of the opera. But Boylan injects such a world-weariness into Marty’s every action that you cannot help but be moved that Marty can no longer be moved. Marty has lived a hundred lives, loved a thousand men, and can love no longer. When she sleeps with Baron Prus in Act III, she derives no pleasure from it: it’s only fucking.
The entire cast deliver great performances but Boylan’s Marty demands you pay full attention to her. Often staged in the centre of the action, it sometimes feels you are so focused on Marty that the other characters do not exist outside of how they relate to her.
In a way, they don’t. The men need no encouragement to become infatuated with her, and then blame her for their own actions when she doesn’t return their affection. They brand her a harlot and cold as ice. She believes herself a victim. In Act III, she’s put on an impromptu ‘trial,’ forced to answer questions from these men. But as she does, she confronts them with an answer to her own question: what is the point of living an everlasting life when an everlasting life erodes all meaning?
When Marty finally greets death, she reveals herself to be everything she’s accused of – and so much more than that. She’s an emotional woman full of passion and love and lust – or at least she once was. And when Marty finally greets death, you mourn with her, not because she died, but because she lived so long.