The Trial s a setting by Philip Glass of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, written in 1914–15 and published posthumously in 1925. It is a phantasmagoric account of a 30-year old bank clerk being arrested for an unspecified crime and his fruitless attempts to confront the totalitarian system within which he finds himself embroiled. It might be noted that its origin clearly predates the worst excesses of 20th-century history. This operatic version, which premiered in 2014, features a libretto by Christopher Hampton, who expertly filleted Kafka’s text, retaining all the salient episodes and the weirdness of its encounters. If it doesn’t totally convey the unreality of the original – why do all the buildings in the unnamed city have courts of law in their attics for instance? – that is compensated for by Glass’ ominous, at times ambiguously jaunty, but always propulsive, music.
This production represents a welcome return of alternative Perth opera company Lost and Found, under the aegis of the Perth Festival. It features a cohort of local singers and members of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under conductor Mark Coughlan, perhaps better known as a pianist. Melissa Cantwell directs. It is a far cry from the usual operatic fare offered up in Perth, and bears comparison with last year’s Dead Man Walking in delivering a high impact work of contemporary relevance.
The Forrest Chase venue is actually a shopping centre, and this event occurred within an unoccupied office space, which provided the right ambience, with raw concrete floors and walls and metallic ducting snaking around the place. The audience was seated around three sides of a performance area, the orchestra rather a long way behind the action. Various screens around the space displayed English surtitles, not entirely necessary as the diction of the cast was uniformly clear (although the reference to “fleas” near the end may have given pause if one didn’t know the context), but it occasionally burst into caps of various sizes to emphasise points. Other screens allowed the singers to see the conductor, and one large one played a video with different objects (an eye in close-up, a moustachioed face (Stalin?) with redacted eyes) and more abstract patterns, but it hardly seemed necessary to the work’s impact.
The action opens, as does the book, with Josef K in bed – in this case, within a glass enclosure, from which he is precipitately hauled by the guards (or policemen). He and most of the male characters wear fairly timeless and placeless dark clothes, but his landlady Frau Grubach is very Mitteleuropäisch in a long skirt and headscarf, similarly the bailiff’s wife, both of whom contrast with the more dashing female characters Fräulein Bürstner and Leni, who wear modern looking pantsuits. The action thereafter takes place in a more forward location, sometimes on a low platform and, in the scenes with the ailing lawyer Huld, on and around another bed. The movements around the considerable space involved are fluent and serve the plot well. The Act 1 encounter between Josef K and the magistrate is accompanied by the rest of the cast revolving around them and reacting in pantomimic style (kudos to choreographer Laura Boynes).
The small orchestra, including some of WASO’s brighter stars (Semra Lee, violin, Andrew Nicholson, flute and Stephanie Nichols, oboe) played with tight cohesion under Coughlan, with a significant contribution from Tommaso Pollio on piano. The singers had quite a challenge; the text is pretty much verbatim (in English translation) from the book, so it is a rather basic prose; the style somewhere in the middle of a Venn diagram of operatic singing, sprechstimme and recitative. The nature of the venue doubtless necessitated their being miked.
Lachlan Higgins, outstanding in the aforementioned Dead Man Walking, also impressed here as Josef K, bringing to bear a warm but firm baritone, and generating both sympathy and exasperation as the beleaguered accused. The rest of the cast all successfully essayed multiple roles. Soprano Rachelle Durkin was in her dramatic and vocal element as Fräulein Bürstner, Leni and one of the little girls plaguing the artist Titorelli, well partnered with Caitlin Cassidy’s rich mezzo tones as Frau Grubach, the usher’s wife and the other annoying girl. The male cast were equally good vocally and dramatically, with Perth stalwart baritone Robert Hofmann lending authority to Uncle Albert and the inspector. Tenor Euan MacMillan was the first guard (Franz) and a suitably worm-like Block, with baritone Lachlann Lawton being his counterpart as Willem the second guard as well as the court usher. Tenor Noah Humich was the lively artist Titorelli and the scary flogger not to mention the uppity student Berthold. The cast was satisfactorily completed by Brett Peart (tenor) as the magistrate and the bed-bound lawyer Huld.
