Cover Image: Jarred Wall in character for The Trial, captured in a tense, off‑balance moment that reflects the opera’s unsettling world. Photo by Cole Baxter.

Turning 30 is enough to instil an existential crisis at the best of times.

For those of us who can remember – and those yet to face the inexorable flip of the calendar towards the dreaded Big Three-Oh – fears of lost youth and unfulfilled adulthood pale when compared with the travails of poor young Josef K.

Franz Kafka’s benighted protagonist wakes up on his 30^th birthday with a trio of State goons standing over his bed ready to charge him for an unknown crime. Thus begins Josef’s descent into a pernicious, surreal bureaucratic hell from which the only escape is a horrific death. 

Published posthumously in 1925, The Trial is the O.G. Kafkaesque tale of nightmarish autocracy that spawned a myriad of stage and screen adaptations including a 1993 Anthony Hopkins film scripted by Harold Pinter. 

In 2014, illustrious composer Philip Glass and Oscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement, The Father) created what Glass called a two-act “pocket opera” of Kafka’s chilling, ever-relevant masterpiece for Music Theatre Wales.

The Trial will have its Australian premiere at Perth Festival thanks to operatic innovators Lost and Found, the local matchmakers of “lost” or rarely performed operas in “found” sites around town where the venue amplifies the performance impact.

Their past productions have included Bizet’s outlandish opera buffa Don Procopio at the Vasto Club in Balcatta, Milhaud’s rage-ridden Médée in a musty old asylum cell at Fremantle Arts Centre and Poulenc’s telephone confessional La Voix Humaine performed in a hotel room for a handful of audience members.

The Trial marks Lost and Found’s comeback after a long break following its pre-Covid Perth Festival premiere of Luke Styles’ Ned Kelly at an old Jarrahdale bush timber mill in 2019.

Founded by co- artistic directors Chris Van Tuinen and Thomas de Mallet Burgess in 2012, Lost and Found is now creatively led by stage director Mel Cantwell and Perth composer, pianist and music leader Mark Coughlan. Van Tuinen is now artistic director at WA Opera but remains on the L&F Board and De Mallet Burgess heads up the Finnish National Opera after a stint at Opera New Zealand.

Cantwell says it’s a thrill for Lost and Found to be relaunched with a site-specific production that embodies Perth Festival Artistic Director Anna Reece’s push to transform sites across the city into places of drama, reflection and revelation. 

Cantwell is staging The Trial in a big empty office space in Forrest Chase, an imposing labyrinth of concrete, metal and glass which recently hosted PICA’s national graduate show Hatched. 

“This is a really great piece for us to come back and show new audiences the sort of work the company does,” Cantwell says of a piece that reflects our own Kafkaesque times. “I’ve always been slightly obsessed with Kafka and have wanted to find a way to stage this story for a while so when I came across the Philip Glass opera it was perfect. What great material for an opera.”

Co-presented by the WA Symphony Orchestra and WA Opera, this site-specific production brings Glass’ music and Kafka’s dark humour into a thrilling dialogue with our times, she says. “It just feels as if the world is ever in a Kafkaesque state, it is now and it feels like time to respond in a beautifully artistic way.”

Acclaimed Noongar cross-genre vocalist Jarred Wall, who starred in the Gina Williams-Guy Ghouse operas Wundig Wer Wilura and Koolbardi Wer Wardong and won 2025 WAM Vocalist of the Year as Boox Kid, leads a cast of eight singers with a 12-piece WASO chamber orchestra conducted by Coughlan.

“Jarred is just so compelling to watch and listen to,” Cantwell says. “There is something so authentic about him on stage that you need in your Josef K character. You need someone who can go on the whole journey from waking up on your 30^th birthday right through to … where we end up. That combination of being a contemporary musician as well as an opera singer is very interesting in mirroring this character going into another world and being absorbed in it.”

The Trial is Glass’s second “pocket” opera based on the writings of Kafka after his 2000 chamber opera In the Penal Colony. “I think of my pocket operas as neutron bombs – small, but packing a terrific punch,” says Glass whose highly influential works include the operas Satyagraha and Einstein on the Beach. 

Cantwell, who recently directed the critically acclaimed Whale Fall (2021) and Mary Stuart (2022) at Perth Festival, says Glass is the ideal composer to evoke Kafka’s disorientated world, with his hypnotic, repetitive minimalism punctuated by moments of surprise in keeping with Josef K’s discombobulated journey.

“It’ll be dramatic and dynamic visually and sonically. It is great to be doing an opera that hardly anybody will have experienced before, so we are looking forward to introducing The Trial to a new audience. I’m fascinated to see what people will make of it.” 

The Trial runs 17-21 February at Level 3, Forrest Chase, Wellington Street. Details and tickets: perthfestival.com.au