Olivia Fuchs on directing The Makropulos Affair for Scottish Opera: 'It’s a very sensual piece'

Wrinkles and warts might seem a long way from the world of opera. But Fuchs is on a roll. “When I was researching The Makropulos Affair,” she continues, “I found out about the Russian zoologist Ilya Mechnikov, who wrote a book called The Prolongation of Life, about delaying the ageing process. Janáček would definitely have known about it. Also around the same time George Bernard Shaw wrote a play about longevity – Back to Methuselah – with characters who live for 300 years or more. Even today, there’s a scientist called Aubrey de Grey who’s predicting that in a few years, we’ll have made humans immortal. Those ideas are still around. This notion that you might want to live for centuries and not embrace death – well, it’s quite interesting.”

If you already know The Makropulos Affair, all this talk of cheating death and longevity will make sense. If you don’t – and, in fairness, it’s not exactly a cornerstone of the repertoire – then you might be wondering what ageing, immortality and a desire for perpetual youth have to do with an opera that seems to revolve around a complicated, centuries-old legal case. “On one level,” Fuchs smiles, “it’s like a detective story, and you’re trying to figure out what happened with the legal dispute, and who was to blame. But whenever I watched the opera myself, I never properly understood that part of it.”

There is, however, a big reveal towards the end of Janáček’s opera that sets its petty squabbles over money and inheritance against a far grander, more cosmic context of life, death and the meaning of both. “I think it’s heavily signposted, though,” Fuchs admits. “Anyone who’s read anything about the opera will have an idea of what’s really going on.”

With Fuchs’s clearance in mind, and with a heavy spoiler alert, we’ll proceed... The Makropulos Affair’s central character – the enigmatic opera diva Emilia Marty, who seems to cast an inescapable spell over all who meet her, and who also seems to know a lot more about events that took centuries earlier than she rightly should – has indeed been around for hundreds of years. “She’s this amazing, very sophisticated, magnetic character that everyone seems to fall for,” Fuchs explains. “She’s honed that charisma over 300 years. But it’s her immense longevity that also accounts for her apparently cruel indifference to those smitten by her. What comes across as cruelty is really because she’s seen it all already, and she just doesn’t care any more. She was an abused girl – that’s how she ended up living for so long – but she transforms that abuse into power and treats others really badly, until the end of the opera, when she suddenly becomes vulnerable again.”

Janáček’s central protagonist is a deeply complex character, and her mysteries are only explained in the opera’s transcendent final act; and Emilia Marty is just one in a succession of rich and compelling female characters around whom the composer’s operas revolve – just think of the titular characters in Kayta Kabanová, Jenůfa and Cunning Little Vixen (all operas that Fuchs has previously directed). Does Fuchs feel she’s able to bring an authentically female perspective to these richly imagined protagonists? “He’s possibly my favourite opera composer because he’s so perceptive,” she says, “and he creates these amazing transcendent and psychologically incisive moments too. Of course I’ll always bring a woman’s perspective to his operas, but there are many different women’s perspectives, because there are many different women. But nonetheless, Janáček is so aware of power and the abuse of power, and he’s very sensitive to the inner life of women.”

Fuchs also draws attention to another crucial theme that runs through Janáček’s operas – one with a particularly potent resonance in The Makropulos Affair. “Janáček is very connected with the cyclical idea of nature, and of life and death forming part of that cycle. It’s not really a Christian belief – it’s more Buddhist or even pagan. And it’s really interesting that The Makropulos Affair is really about the disruption of that cycle of life and death, so that life is then not appreciated.”

It’s a disruption that Fuchs reflects in her production, which focuses in on the opera’s inherent strangeness, its dream-like unreality. “Because it was written in the 1920s,” she explains, “we’ve looked at it through something of a surrealist lens, with psychology and dreams and history all coming together. One aspect of that is that, since Emilia Marty is so charismatic, even her environment responds to her.” So, watch out for some magical stage effects dotted throughout Fuch’s production, as apparently inanimate objects seem to respond to our heroine’s very presence.

Fuchs’s staging – already unveiled at co-producers Welsh National Opera in 2022 – went down so well that it was nominated for a Southbank Sky Arts Award. But the director is approaching the production with fresh eyes and ears for Scottish Opera. “The biggest change is that in Scotland we’re singing it in English rather than Czech. There’s so much emotional intensity, and the plot whizzes by so fast, that hopefully it will make it far easier for the audience to grasp – and maybe even a bit easier for us to rehearse! But a lot of the cast are different too, so the production will naturally be evolving – there are certain anchor points, of course, that I don’t want to lose, but hopefully new aspects will also emerge.”

Among Fuchs’s changing cast and personnel are renowned Irish soprano Orla Boylan in the all-important central role, and seasoned opera conductor Martyn Brabbins in the pit. “It’s always good to return to a production, though,” Fuchs continues, “because you can go deeper, explore more, discover more about it.”

Indeed, The Makropulos Affair is a work that, despite its thematic cleverness and high-flying conceits, remains a deeply emotional experience. And it’s an opera that Fuchs herself clearly feels passionately about. “It’s a very sensual piece, even if it’s very harsh at times, too – in some ways it shows that contrast in human nature. Yes, we can be cruel, but we can also be extraordinarily vulnerable, humane, compassionate.”

The Makropulos Affair is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow on 15, 19 and 22 February and the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, on 27 February and 1 March, see www.scottishopera.org.uk

Produced in partnership with Scottish Opera