The Makropulos Affair, Welsh National Opera review - complexity realised brilliantly on the stage. Janáček’s collisions spark an evening of powerful conflict.

What, anyway, is The Makropulos Case all about? Is it simply about the horrors of unnatural longevity; or does it expose the limitations of the rational mind confronted by the irrational; is it about love of a distorted ideal, like some updated Hoffmann tale?  Or is it simply a well-made play disrupted by theatre of the absurd and turned for good measure into a tragic music drama?

The truth is that it’s all these things and more, a work of stunning complexity both dramatically and, especially, musically. And the best thing I can say about Olivia Fuchs’s new production is that it takes account of all these issues, all these levels, and in the process convinces me, for one, that this is Janáček’s most powerful and innovative, if not greatest, stage work.

Janáček’s knotty study of immortality soars at Welsh National Opera.

Self-belief, urgent and impassioned, burst forth from Welsh National Opera’s new staging of Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair (1926), directed by Olivia Fuchs and conducted by Tomáš Hanus. Confidence is the elusive key to any performance, the magnet that draws you in.

The Makropulos Affair, review: an unmissable triumph for Welsh National Opera.

The story is based on a 1922 play by Karel Čapek; the emotionally driven direction is by Olivia Fuchs. Nicola Turner’s designs frame the intensity of the piece: the first act is all grey filing cabinets and surreal floating legal pages, as the old lawsuit of Gregor versus Prus (the case that leads to the revelations of Emilia’s past) is examined; the second act backstage at the opera is a pile of red roses, Emilia’s red hair and red dress; the third act for the hotel-room denouement is brilliant white, with endless white suitcases with the initials E.M. In each act, a clock signals the passage of time.

…The lesson of Fuchs’s production is clearly that we interfere with the course of nature, the rhythm of life and death, at our peril: in her final desperate moments, her head shaven, the accumulated tragedy of the many lives Emilia has led is overwhelming.

Welsh National Opera’s The Makropulos Affair review – this is a triumph.

It would be easy for such an idiosyncratic piece to come a cropper. Director Olivia Fuchs navigates its complexities with a sure touch, aided by Nicola Turner’s 1920s sets with a surreal edge, Robbie Butler’s warm lighting and Sam Sharples’s subtle video. Details tell. Just one example: when the mysterious lead character, Emilia Marty, makes her first entrance into the fusty solicitor’s office, piles of paper spring into giant columns. Something strange is in the air.