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 The latest of the prolific Glass's "pocket operas" for small
ensembles had its premiere on Saturday night at the intimate
Linbury Studio Theatre in the basement of London's Royal Opera
House in a production by Music Theatre Wales.
The production features eight versatile singers, who with the
exception of K, sung by the excellent British baritone Johnny
Herford who is on stage almost all the time, play a variety of
roles. The band consists of 12 instrumentalists.
The same group had a success several years ago with a previous
Glass adaptation of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", so neither
the composer nor the troupe are newcomers to the dark works of
the Czech master of paranoia.
The program notes point out that when Kafka gave his first
reading of the book a century ago, those who heard him were "all
helpless with laughter".
The Keystone Cops-like demeanor of the two official-looking
black-coated intruders, Franz and Willem, who begin the opera by
telling banker Josef K. in his bedroom that he is under arrest -
and then eat his breakfast - did get a guffaw or two.
So does the bawdy behavior of various women who, in the world
Kafka describes, find accused men to be irresistible.
Kafka's work - written before "extraordinary rendition",
detentions without trial for prisoners at Guantanamo and a host
of modern security powers - provides a chilling new context for
Glass's opera.
In almost every scene, from the outset when K assumes that his
arrest, on his 30th birthday, is a mistake or a prank by his
co-workers, through his meetings with court officials and
lawyers that begin to convince him his case is hopeless, people
are always watching him - in effect like human CCTV cameras.
K's one glimmer of hope comes near the outset when the Inspector
tells him that although he is under arrest, for charges he
cannot divulge, he is free to go about his daily routines.
"Then being under arrest is not so bad," K says, to which the
Inspector responds: "I didn’t say it was."
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Later, though, K meets an Usher of the court who tells him the stark
reality: "We don’t put people on trial for no reason."
As is typical of Glass in his big works like "Einstein on the Beach"
or "Akhnaten", a pulsating rhythm keeps the work moving along so the
libretto by Christopher Hampton, despite its seeming wordiness, does
not come across that way in performance.
What is lacking - also typically of Glass operas - is much in the
way of emotionally engaging music for the singers.
There is a mechanical quality to the way the score progresses, which
is perhaps appropriate for K's situation, since he is caught in an
almost clock-like mechanism that is counting down the days to his
execution, by the same Willem and Franz, one day before his 31st
birthday.
The standout exception is a powerful aria for the Priest, sung near
the opera's end by English bass-baritone Nicholas Folwell, in which
he informs K that he has been under a common delusion that there was
any hope for him being cleared.
He sings a parable about a "doorkeeper to the Law" and a countryman
who spends his life waiting patiently for admittance - and dies
before getting there.
Shortly afterwards Willem and Franz march K to a spot where they
execute him with a butcher knife that they let him inspect, so that
he knows he has been killed, as he sings with his dying breath,
"Like a dog, like a dog".
"The Trial" will have performances at the Linbury through Oct. 18
after which it goes on tour to various venues throughout Britain.
(Michael Roddy is an arts and entertainment editor for Reuters. The
views expressed are his own.)
(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
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