The Trial - Perth Festival
- 13 hours ago
- 2 min read
Reviewed by Kate O'Sullivan
As part of Perth Festival, The Trial arrives with the quiet authority you’d expect from Philip Glass’s 26th opera, spare in scale but anything but slight in impact.
Based on The Trial by Franz Kafka, with a libretto by Christopher Hampton, the work distils Kafka’s unfinished WWI-era novel into a lean, unsettling two-act chamber opera. Eight singers take on multiple roles, accompanied by a 12-player ensemble, and from this modest framework emerges something vast: a portrait of the interminable inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of The Law.
On the morning of his 30th birthday, bank clerk Josef K. (Lachlan Higgins) is arrested for an unnamed crime. He is told he may go about his life, provided he attends court as required. From there, his world becomes a maze of half-answers, shadowy officials and shifting rules, a system that appears organised yet resists understanding at every turn.
Staged on an empty office floor at the top of Forrest Chase, the production embraces the brutal anonymity of corporate architecture. The vastness of the space is both asset and obstacle. At times, the action feels dwarfed, distanced from the three-sided audience, and structural pillars occasionally interrupt sight-lines. Yet that same spatial dislocation feeds the atmosphere. The awkward angles, the obstructed views, the exposed glass atrium overhead all contribute to the sense of being watched, assessed and processed. The building itself becomes complicit.
Costuming is clean and deliberate, with a disciplined palette of black and white that resists the temptation to editorialise with colour. The effect is stark, bureaucratic and impersonal.
Higgins proves a compelling Josef K., marrying vocal precision with dramatic clarity. His baritone is warm yet edged with strain, charting the character’s steady psychological erosion. He captures the mounting confusion and frustration of a man attempting to reason with a system that has no interest in reason. Rachelle Durkin brings sharp comic instinct to her dual roles of mistress, carer and seductress and Brett Peart’s magistrate and lawyer feel deliberately obfuscating, each circling language rather than clarifying it. Across the board, the cast handles the unusual staging with assurance.
Kafka’s text lands with bracing immediacy. It is provocative, at times brutal, and recognisably funny in its bleak absurdity. For someone who has a genuine interest in the law, and its effect on the rest of us, the piece resonates uncomfortably. The systems that claim to protect us remain opaque, accountability is deferred and process replaces justice. A century on, the satire barely needs updating.
This production wisely commits to the language, allowing its dry humour and quiet terror to speak plainly. There were occasional moments when the sung English did not quite align with the projected surtitles, which proved mildly distracting, particularly in a work performed in the audience’s own language where discrepancies become noticeable. It is difficult to know where such slips originate, but they momentarily pull focus.
Still, these are minor blemishes in an otherwise rigorously realised staging. In an age that devotes endless money and screen-time to bureaucratic spectacle, The Trial feels less like a period adaptation and more like a timely commentary.
Reviewer Note: Tickets for this review were provided by Perth Festival.
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