The Makropulos Case @ Edinburgh Festival Theatre

The dusty papers of a lawyer's office, and the case of Prus V Gregor which has consumed many generations, like Jarndyce and Jarndyce, is the unlikely background for a mystery thriller, the desperate quest of a 300 year-old Diva to regain the secret formula which she now needs to renew her fading beauty and youth. "Eternally young – but only burnt-out feeling. Cold as ice," Janacek described her. Fire and ice are recurrent themes throughout.

At the premiere of Opera North's superb production of The Makropulos Case, directed by Tom Cairns, Janáček's libretto after Karel Čapek is sung in English with English supertitles, so there's no chance the audience will miss the dry wit of the text. I had no idea that legal jargon and dates of birth could be so humourous, but it is a cynical, ironic humour.

Written in 1926, it is set in Prague in 1922, as is this production. Ylva Kihlberg, who sings the role of Emilia Marty (the mysterious E.M. who has assumed many different names over her 300 years) is outstanding in Janáček's most complex role. She has a commanding presence and performs with laconic amusement, tired of her many admirers. Self-centred, she still cares that she rivals other opera singers.

The vocal line, which in the original reflects the speech rhythms of the Czech language, is effective in English too:  short statements, fragments which the orchestral score responds to in searing, dissonant harmonies, a dislocated call and response, where the orchestra, a moving performance conducted by Richard Farnes, expresses the emotional undercurrent.

All the men desire and are destroyed by her. Paul Nilon, who sings the part of Albert Gregor, is the perfect foil to her disdainful beauty. A pitiful clown, when rejected he becomes murderous. Janek (sung by Adrian Dwyer) is driven to suicide, and his father, Baron Prus (sung by a wonderfully pompous Robert Hayward) only feels self-hatred due to her coldness when she sells herself to him in return for the formula.

The acidic turquoise Art Deco wall remains part of each set, as if Emilia Marty cannot escape her world. The imaginative potential of the lawyer's library of documents is not exploited, but the towering cone of white curtains through which we see Emilia Marty on her bed in the last act, is visually stunning, suggesting the ice she is entrapped in.

Magnificent in a red dress, Emilia Marty's curtain call is unexpected since it is at the start of the second act. This self-referential nod to opera as an artifact, is also enacted by Kristina, sung by Stephanie Corley, who claims that she cannot sing, whilst singing an accomplished flourish.This Modernist distancing is abruptly abandoned when the opera deepens into a moving metaphysical meditation on desire and mortality.

We realize that Emilia Marty is also a victim: forced to drink the elixir by her father, she now feels no love or joy. The theatrical and musical intensity of her final moments blaze, just as the document itself, set fire to by Kristina. For life without joy, who wants it?