The Trial
Forrest Chase
Wednesday, February 18 2026
Lost and Found Opera, in association with West Australian Opera and West Australian Symphony Orchestra, brought Franz Kafka’s The Trial to the stage as an opera, as composed by Philip Glass in 2014, to Perth Festival this season. Much of the preliminary intrigue of this piece was how the often absurdist and obtuse source material would translate from the page to a live theatre setting—the finished product brought forward exceeded all expectations.
The otherworldliness of Kafka’s writing extended to the audience’s arrival at the venue, well before the performance began. An all-but-abandoned floor in an anonymous office building in the central city, with a waiting area full of folding chairs, unpainted drywall, and exposed air conditioning ducts, generated a deep sense of unease. With enough drop sheets and harsh strip lighting to make Dexter Morgan or Patrick Bateman feel at home, this could have been The Backrooms brought to life, with an atmosphere cold, sterile, and uninviting.
When being moved to the performance space, the audience was stopped outside a glass box, built to resemble an office meeting room. Within this box, the cast were on display as if a zoo exhibit—they practised their movements and their lines, which the crowd could not hear. A stunning visual and emotional gambit by the design team, again, before the show had even truly started.
With the audience seated in a horseshoe configuration around a floodlit stage that could easily have doubled as either a post-industrial gymnasium or prison grounds, Act One began.
Baritone and WAAPA graduate Lachlan Higgins gamely bore the weight of the entire plot on his shoulders as protagonist Josef K., woken on the morning of his thirtieth birthday to detention by Guards and subsequent arrest by an Inspector. Though the nature of the charge was never discussed, either in the book or the opera, K was assured at this stage that the arrest meant little to nothing and that he could go on with the rest of his life, almost as normal.
As also happened in the source, K compared notes of that morning with his landlady and neighbour before arriving late to a court date he was not told the address for, during which he continued to irritate the Magistrate, who literally controlled K’s fate. He arrived promptly for the next court appointment only to find an empty building, bereft of both people and hope, before embarking on a three-way tug of war for the affections of the court usher’s wife.
The more K fought against the mystery charge, the more he pushed away wise counsel, the worse his situation got, and the greater the collateral damage to all around him. Convinced of his own righteousness, the performance became an unflattering character study in which K’s selfishness and disregard of others, except where he could use them, shone ever brighter. The system was indeed very, very broken, but most others had adjusted sufficiently well to get by.
No one was innocent; all were guilty in some way. The lawyers and judges divided the world between them; a bohemian painter knew more of the law than all the judicial officers put together, and K, who had compartmentalised the trial away to nothing in the beginning, grew more and more obsessed by the case as the performance jumped to Act Two.
Some of the other cast that joined Higgins were local tenor Brett Peart, primarily in the roles of the Magistrate and Lawyer Huld; soprano Rachelle Durkin, in the dual roles of neighbour Fraulein Burstner and Huld’s carer and mistress Leni; and West Australian Opera stalwart Robert Hofmann, as both the Inspector and K’s Uncle Albert.
Act One was strong, especially the hearing with the Magistrate, played as expressionist cabaret, but two of the scenes from Act Two were perhaps the standouts of the night. Firstly, in Huld’s bedroom, where the lawyer was convalescing after illness, he was joined by K, Leni, and secondary client Block (Euan MacMillan). This scene enacted a series of concurrent power plays between the characters that, as it progressed, distinctly leant into sexual control, voyeurism and even perhaps the slightest taste of BDSM.
The music, played live in a corner, a tense heartbeat to the evening underneath the entire piece, came even more to the fore in this moment. As it ended, K dispensed with any further legal representation, and the audience exhaled as one, only just realising they had held their breath for much of the scene.
The second set piece of note was underpinned by another power imbalance, with the characters very deliberately at different physical heights—K standing on the floor, whilst a prison chaplain (Lachlann Lawton) loomed above from a raised stage. This was a deeply metaphysical discussion of the overwhelming extent of the law, how K had barely brushed the edges of such, and how it progressed to become more religious liturgy than anything seemingly grounded in reality. Faith, salvation, and some form of judicial afterlife all passed K and the audience by in a blur.
Overall, The Trial was a visceral, sensual experience that took Kafka’s writing from a century ago, dry and somewhat convoluted as it remained, and injected colour and passion, blood and bone. None of the new operatic mannerisms took away from the uncertainty, paranoia, and slight nausea of the original text—indeed, many aspects of the performance added further to this underlying unease. All the cast sang magnificently; the design, lighting, and staging were all exquisite, and the orchestra added their own magic touch.
The Trial was astonishingly great, even better than the audience’s highest expectations, and one almost wished to return to it the very next evening. Full credit needs to be given to the production team that put this spectacular piece together.