IN L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a yellow brick road leads Dorothy and company to the Emerald City, a land whose apparent “brightness and glory” is ultimately deceptive.

Everything appears green to visitors because of the tinted glasses they are forced to wear upon arrival. In reality, the place is “no more green than any other city”.

As Brighton Little Theatre prepares to stage the classic tale for its annual Christmas play, it is offering aspiring actors an altogether more genuine route to fulfilling their dreams.

Since forming in 1940, the not-for-profit organisation has given a platform to those with no prior acting experience. The group’s 71-seater theatre in Clarence Gardens is host to between 10 and 12 plays a year – all driven by the love and talent of volunteers. The company currently has just over 200 members.

With such spatial constraints, you would expect minimalism to be the most suitable course of action when staging an elaborate story such as The Wizard of Oz.

“You would think that would be the sensible choice, but it’s not usually the way we go” laughs Mimi Goddard, a member of BLT for six years and director of the Christmas play. “We’ve built up a tradition of doing shows that push the boundaries of what we’re capable of.

“Wizard of Oz has 28 different scenes with at least six or seven different locations, so to create a set that can represent that is quite a challenge in the space that we have. We have a guy called Steve Adams with us who is a genius at set design, though. We have so many creative people that it is thrilling to have to come up with solutions to portray a hot air balloon taking off, for instance.”

Goddard, who has a degree in photography and a day-job as a pharmacist, has tried her hand at almost everything in the company, from make-up artist (for a production of Frankenstein, no less) to director. “I’m a very creative person but in a pharmacy, when you’re handing out medication to people, creativity is frowned upon.

"When I joined Brighton Little Theatre I felt I had found my spiritual home, without being cheesy.”

As for Goddard’s acting experience, she tends to specialise in comedy maid characters. A fairly niche area to be typecast in. “I’m very good at dropping trays,” she says.

There are six new members cast in The Wizard of Oz, which runs from Friday, December 9 to Saturday, December 17.

After paying a £20 sign-up free, any member is free to audition for any production (a mailing list keeps the roster informed). For The Wizard of Oz there is a cast of 23, which, as Goddard says, is a challenging number of people to fit on to a small stage at any given time.

“Our biggest push is always to attract new members,” says Goddard. “The lion in this production is a new member, for example. We’re always doing workshops and events to reach out, and our play readings are very popular with those who aren’t so confident in their acting abilities.”

To balance out the group, there are some seasoned (but still amateur) actors that have a relatively long history of treading the BLT boards. Rehearsals for The Wizard of Oz are underway, and going “scarily well” according to Goddard.

“You do get cautious about a blip along the way at some point,” she adds, “but 80 per cent of a good production is your casting. We’re pretty well set in that regard, which takes a lot of pressure off me. They all work incredibly hard and a lot of tea and biscuits are consumed.”

It is difficult to argue with Goddard’s assertion that “there aren’t that many good Christmas shows bar A Christmas Carol or the Nativity”, and, after tackling A Wonderful Life in 2015, this year’s production fits into a BLT tradition of staging alternative Christmas plays.

“Maybe The Wizard of Oz isn’t Christmassy as such, but they have associations with Christmas,” says the director. “For me it is very Christmassy because I always watched it at Christmas as a child. That was the logic behind the choice.”

Baum’s much-loved tale, which was adapted into a film starring Judy Garland in 1939, sees a dreaming Dorothy wake up in a foreign environment – “Munchkinland” in the world of Oz. Her bewildered line “We’re not in Kansas anymore” has become one of the best-known lines in literary and film history.

As she embarks on a journey to find The Wizard of Oz, who she believes has the power to return her home, she encounters three figures with starkly different desires; a scarecrow who wants a brain, a tin man who is seeking a heart, and a cowardly lion who is in need of courage. Does Goddard think the evident moral message of the story – self-improvement and overcoming adversity through collaboration – is behind its timeless appeal?

“I think so, but I also think it displays morality in a subtle way,” she says. “I have a real aversion to plays that hit you over the head with a message. We all associate ourselves with Dorothy – we’ve all been in weird places and wanted to get home. The story is so magical, though, and presents that theme in such a nice way.”

Goddard has taken much pride and joy over the years in seeing BLT’s members express themselves on stage. She suggests the escapism of theatre offers a beneficial outlet to many people with nine-to-five careers. As the aforementioned characters of the play come to realise, the theatre members believe “they can be anything they want to be” after joining.

“We have doctors, teachers, pharmacists, retail people, and they all come back because they love it. Once you get a taste of that adrenaline it really is like a drug. There are great people in this production who are happy just to play a flying monkey or a tree.”