THE WELSH National Opera’s Rhyddid (Freedom) series continues with this first staging of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, which lays bare the banality and bureaucratic nightmare of trying to get a visa from an unidentified consulate to escape life in a totalitarian country.

Director Max Hoehn’s production has the ensemble looking like refugees from ’Allo ’Allo! but without any gallows humour to leaven the grimness as the narrative follows the misfortunes of Magda Sorel (Giselle Allen).

She’s trying to get exit visas for herself and her baby son to join fugitive husband John (Gary Griffiths), who has fled from the secret police.

Sorel’s repeated brushes with an obdurate secretary barring her way to meet the unseen Consul to gain the elusive exit permit includes a slapstick scene in the consulate, where Peter Hoare’s magician stages his act to try and persuade the bureaucrat to give him a visa.

He hypnotises his fellow potential refugees and two secret policemen to ballroom dance and, while moderately amusing, it is not enough to save the production.

Despite the anguish of losing her baby and mother, Allen fails to make the emotional connection the work deserves in this age of refugees.

But though the production misfires, it is just one weak link in what has been an enthralling series of works focusing on human rights.

The Rhyddid season continues until June 23, details wno.org