The Makropoulous case

Moving away from the recent expressionistic interpretations of ‘The Makroupolis Case’, Hudson set out to explore the ways in which the conventions of naturalism would affect a contemporary audience’s reading of this work. Playing with the notion of ‘the shock of the old’ and in the context of the Lefebvre’s work on ‘The Production of Space’, Hudson was interested in the ways in which audiences acclimatised to the eclectic mix of post-modern design would respond to a detailed realistic staging. By researching and rooting his designs in the 1920s, the decade in which the opera was written, Hudson played with layers of presentation and representation. Utilising the conventions of naturalism Hudson created a series of meticulously observed representational spaces. Encoded in the design were subtle visual threads that linked the three acts; a set of tall bookcases in the first act are mirrored in the second by a set of tall flats; the proscenium arch in the second act becomes an arched entrance into a bedroom in the third. In rehearsal each word of the libretto was thoroughly investigated and Hudson sought to echo this detail in every aspect of the scenography to enable the visual expression of the work to have equal resonance. His aim was to dislocate the action and accentuate the surrealism embedded within the plot, thus re-creating the shock and subversive impact of the original production for a contemporary audience