The Trial

The title of this latest Philip Glass opera lives up to its name about halfway through when Glass exhausts his repertoire of minimalist riffs with an hour still to go.

But the main problem is that librettist Christopher Hampton (at Glass’s behest) is far too faithful to Franz Kafka’s absurdist 1925 novel. Despite endless possibilities for contemporising, neither the staging, the verbose text, nor the music ever escape the vibe of a slightly wry, adult comic strip.

It begins with a pair of officers – resembling Stalin and Lenin dressed as Hergé’s Thompson Twins – arriving in the bedroom of Joseph K, a petulant, 30-year-old bank manager. He might be innocent of the unspecified crime in Kafka’s dystopian world, but he is guilty of hubris. He does himself no favours by criticising the topsy-turvy legal system in which trials may never get a court date and judges are corrupt.

Meanwhile, the court clerk’s wife (a creamy voiced Amanda Forbes) is irresistibly attracted to the accused and romps with him before her hapless husband (bass-baritone Nicholas Folwell). Unfortunately, this circular plot never gets anywhere, and is surely a missed opportunity to turn K into a real man, a victim of state terror in a world that we recognise, rather than a one-dimensional character from a book, who engenders no empathy.

The cast of eight puts on a slick performance under the direction of Michael McCarthy. The pleasing baritone Johnny Herford makes a fine K. Michael Bennett is engaging as Block, the whining, craven co-accused. However, some fine voices, including bass Michael Druiett and baritone Gwion Thomas, are sadly unexploited.

The Music Theatre Wales chamber ensemble plays well under Michael Rafferty, cleanly swapping the rocking figures, and rising and falling scales. However, it sounds like music straight off the Glass shelf, which bears no relationship to the action. One has the impression that the sequences could be easily swapped around. Occasionally, though, it works – an insistent snare drum and sneering trombone, for instance, is reminiscent of Shostakovich (and just imagine if he had written this!).