What if immortality was just a really awkward dinner party that lasted 300 years?
Based on the eponymous play by K. Čapek, directed by the State Academic Maly Theatre of the USSR. The Macropoulos Method — an elixir of immortality, the possibility of which becomes a test of the characters' human integrity in the play.
Acting
Kornienko's centuries-weary glamour burns through the screen
Production
Maly Theatre's staging creates claustrophobic aristocratic time capsule
Director
Maya Markova
Nelli Kornienko
Эмилия Марти
Vladimir Kenigson
Ярослав Прус
Eduard Martsevich
Альберт Грегор
Aleksandr Ovchinnikov
Янек
Yevgeni Vesnik
Гаук-Шeндорф
Evgeniya Glushenko
Кристина
Galina Skorobogatova
Горничная
Sergey Konov
Адвокат Коленатый
Arkady Smirnov
Витек
Lyudmila Gajlikovskaya
уборщица
Vladimir Kolosov
машинист сцены
Andrei Litvinov
врач
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Capek wrote this in 1922, between his R.U.R. robot apocalypse and his death in 1938 — it's his quietest, most humanist work, born from watching Europe destroy itself.
The Maly Theatre production was legendary; this 1979 television capture preserves a staging that Soviet audiences debated for years. Janáček's opera adaptation gets all the love, but this is the text pure.
SU
