The seasonally appropriate name change was just one of the amendments made by director/producer Nigel Brown. Brown, by day a department of agriculture employee, has fiddled with much of the script, editing character names, adding a prologue and making many, many jokes.

Monday night was the dress rehearsal for the Council's second show of the year with premiere set for later this week.

Carmen Elvins, mistress of the revels, has been cast as a character called Avapissup - read it aloud. She is hailed at one point as a "purveyer of sustenance - snags, slabs and stubbies".

Easily the best moment of the show is the death of Bottom (Jay Post), who milks the melodramatic moment for all it's got (though to my mind, even more would be better).

Impish Puck (Denis Haselwood) repeatedly steals the show as "a comic faerie" who raises the curtain with a prologue that explains the updated language. Nigel Brown said Mr Haselwood has been treading the boards in Glen Innes for over 50 years and claims to be the oldest actor to play Puck.

He's certainly the most experienced of a cast of 21 with 16 of them new to Glen Innes. For 12 cast members it's their first time on stage anywhere.

"I've deliberately done that to increase the interest and membership of people," said Nigel Brown.

"I'm so pleased with the way that all of them have come on.

"They've just risen to the occasion. All four young lovers were just really brilliant."

Midwinter night's dream, like the original, has a soap-opera plot involving magic, incompetence, a play-within-a-play and a love triangle with four participants. Nigel has really leaned into the silliness of a plot which has four teenagers wandering around the woods at night, now set at the Standing Stones, in which the solution to problems caused by magic is more magic.

The play is set on the Avon river - we're told it intersects with the Severn river in the UK, not in Ranger's Valley. Characters use iambic pentameter to call each other "drongo". The script includes a dubious rhyme between "piss" and "list".

A couple of other things to look out for: Queen Titania's hat (the very regal Enaowyn O'Sirideain), Oberon's silly Aussie accent, Snout (Lochlan Davidson) and his very convincing falsetto as Thisbe, and the non-verbal acting of Kylie (Ashley Emmerton).

This is the 75^th year of the Arts Council, the oldest continuously-running Arts Council in Australia.

To celebrate the occasion the Council are putting on the ABBA jukebox musical Mamma Mia, featuring live music and the original set based on a Greek Island. The direction team are already on board and planning has already started.

Nigel said they had planned to do one Midwinter Night at the actual standing stones, but were foiled by chilly weather. The Arts Council has plans to do an outside play perhaps for Mamma Mia, during summer.

Midwinter Night will run Wednesday afternoon and Friday and Saturday night this week, with a Sunday matinee and night showings from Thursday to Saturday next week.