US minimalist composer Philip Glass calls his adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story of a man who wakes to find himself accused of an unnamed crime by an omnipotent and incomprehensible bureaucracy a “pocket opera”.

Lost & Found Opera’s production is indeed modest compared to your standard Verdi, but it nevertheless involves eight singers in multiple roles, together with eight instrumentalists – highly ambitious for an independent company.

Lachlan Higgins as K  in Lost & Found Opera’s The Trial. Photo © Chris Canato

Designed by Bruce McKinven, the production is staged in a stripped-out warehouse, punctuated with four black squares on the ground or built up as raised platforms, within whose boundaries most of the production’s intimate scenes occur.

Between these playing areas run routes along which the characters process backwards and forwards, or right to left, as though locked onto tracks within some grotesque machine.

At the back of the space lies a glass-enclosed office in which other scenes occur, a scenographic flourish that inevitably brings to mind the use of similar on-stage see-through walls in the work of Benedict Andrews, Richard Foreman...