US Edition 
Edinburgh Festival 2012: The Makropulos Case, Festival Theatre, review
This performance of Janáček’s late masterpiece The Makropulos Case at Edinburgh Festival 2012 is fuelled by a brilliant acerbic score, though lead Ylva Kihlberg lacks charisma, writes Rupert Christiansen.
She is free from mental or physical pain; she is neither demented nor remorseful; she has money, allure, wit, status. But prima donna Emilia Marty has an astonishing secret: born Elena Makropulos and subsequently reincarnated under several other names, she is now over 300 years old and the effect of the elixir of longevity provided by her alchemist father is beginning to wear out.
Disenchanted with life and everything it has to offer – good and evil, joy and sorrow, and above all, the delusion of love – she badly wants to die. This is the haunting donnée of one of Janáček’s late masterpieces, based on a play by Karel Capek: the message it vouchsafes is that eternal youth would in truth be a terrible curse, and that death, did we but know it, is our kindest friend.
Deeply cynical yet also weirdly uplifting, the opera is a tragic satire (or perhaps a satire of tragedy) fuelled by a trenchant, brilliant, acerbic score without superfluous lyricism or consoling warmth.
Tom Cairns’s new staging for Opera North, presented in a 1950s setting designed by Hildegard Bechtler, is cool and lucid and refreshingly untricksy. More than most productions, it carefully emphasises that Marty’s beauty has become something that she can only maintain cosmetically and that what precipitates her despair is partly vanity, a sense of her imminent loss of power to seduce and charm.
If only Ylva Kihlberg’s performance as the diva radiated more charisma. She sings cleanly and acts conscientiously, but there’s something insipidly suburban about her glamour, and she seemed less the ruthlessly cold-eyed man-eating femme fatale than an ingénue out of her emotional depth. It’s just not a role for a singer as young as she is, and as a result her climactic revelation and renunciation was less moving than it can be.
Paul Nilon, Robert Hayward, James Creswell and Stephanie Corley offer sharply etched performances as the moths fluttering around her flame, but the evening’s star is Richard Farnes, who conducts his orchestra with a finely judged sense of the work’s febrile modernist edge and urban restlessness: under his electrifying baton, the music reaches a white heat of intensity without blasting the singers or losing the plot.
13 August, then in repertory on tour October 18 to November 22. Box office 0131 473 2000