Will Yeoman attends a preview performance of Lost & Found Opera’s bold new production of Philip Glass’s The Trial in the nightmarish environs of a disused office space in Forrest Chase.

The Trial (1925) is Franz Kafka’s surreal portrait of the individual’s helplessness in the face of external and internal forces which defy understanding. Its ancestors include Dicken’s Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit and Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Bleak House; echoes of its bleak authoritarianism can be found in later novels such as Brave New World and 1984.

The Trial (2014) is typical of Philip Glass’s late-operatic manner: neither the iconoclastic ritual of Einstein on the Beach, nor the monumental “portrait” frescoes of Satyagraha and Akhnaten, but a tightened, “theatre-forward” Glass. The work is in two acts, in English, on a libretto by regular collaborator Christopher Hampton after Kafka, and it was jointly commissioned by Music Theatre Wales with major UK/European partners.

The Trial (2026) is Lost & Found Opera’s Australian premier production of Glass’s opera, directed by Melissa Cantwell and conducted by Mark Coughlan. Presented by Lost & Found and Perth Festival in association with West Australian Opera and West Australian Symphony Orchestra, it’s a bold project that heralds the triumphant return of this innovative, highly acclaimed small WA opera company after several years in abeyance.

The Trial, however, in this Tuesday night preview performance, may for some audience members have proved a trial in more ways than one.

First, a brief synopsis: Josef K., a bank clerk, awakens on his 30th birthday to mysterious agents arresting him for an unspecified crime, without imprisonment or formal charges. He navigates a labyrinthine, opaque legal system through hearings in dingy attics, encounters with seductive figures like Leni and Fräulein Bürstner, and futile consultations with lawyers like Huld and the painter Titorelli, who outlines illusory acquittal options. Exactly one year later, on the eve of his 31st birthday, two men execute him in a quarry, where he dies uttering, “Like a dog!”

And so we the audience ascend in a lift to a vast disused office space on Forrest Chase’s Level 3 and take our seats along one of three walls. There will be few set changes. We have instead – if you include the orchestra “pit” and a glass-walled cubicle – six discrete “rooms” or “stages”, arranged in a kind of rectangular grid, on and among which the 10 scenes are played out.

One effect of this is a radically different experience of the performance depending on where you’re sitting. The singers and orchestra are however – necessarily, given the venue’s less than ideal acoustics – miked, so the sound is consistent throughout. There are also projections projecting the same Weimar vibe as the suggestion of pancake foundation and red blush on the black-clad performers’ faces. References to Kafka’s equally famous, and apposite, story, Metamorphosis, abound.

Of the cast Lachlan Higgins, who was so impressive as Joseph de Rocher in Freeze Frame Opera’s inventive take on Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, stands out as Josef K, his mounting frustration, sexual and otherwise, deftly communicated. Also excellent are Rachelle Durkin as Fräulein Bürstner et al., and Lachlann Lawton’s priest in the cathedral scene. Titorelli seems to lie just outside Noah Humich’s tessitura but his hammy characterisation redeems his performance. Coughlan directs a small WASO orchestra with as much skill and deftness as Cantwell does the cast.

Other serious behind-the-scenes talent includes designer Bruce McKinven, Lighting Designer, Matthew Erren and choreographer Laura Boynes. Speaking of the latter’s work, the wriggling, dancing crowd – a grotesque parody of a Greek chorus – in the first act’s courtroom scene is a real tour-de-force.

In so many ways the choice of venue was a masterstroke. The exposed ventilation ducts and electrical wiring of the office are a perfect counterpoint to the hidden machinations of the all-pervasive Court and its implacable administrative “ministrations”. The generous floorspace is effectively a blank canvas, a playground for the imagination.

This latter fact however proves to be the production’s downfall. Glass’s relentlessly motoric music and Hampton’s often banal libretto – both deliberately so and so, so suited to the reigning Kafkaesque-ims – require a less diffuse, more intimate, even claustrophobic staging to unleash their fullest potential. Here, one is too easily distracted by what lies beyond the locus of any given scene.

The unreliable miking on this occasion proved equally distracting – though I assume this will be addressed for subsequent performances. In any case, the instrumental and vocal music absolutely needs to be heard unplugged. This is, after all, a chamber opera.

By comparison, I cannot help but recall Lost & Found’s 2015 tightly-focused and contained production of Darius Milhaud’s Médée in a former padded asylum cell within the walls of the now-Fremantle Arts Centre – for me, one of this splendid company’s high points.

So: fractured, fragmented and frustrating this Trial is. Just not always for the right reasons.